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Show 390 MR. G. E. H. BARRETT-HAMILTON ON [Apr. 3, representative, and I could not hear of it in Kamchatka; but its absence from the latter country is not surprising when it is considered that the peninsula, as shown by its general fauna, has probably been isolated as an island until recent times, and further that we are not aware of the presence of 3Ius sylvaticus in the two main roads thither, in Chukchiland or the Kuril Islands. In Asia Minor it was found by Menetries amongst the mountains of Talyche, by Canon Tristram on the plains of Palestine, and Danford caught a specimen " while running about on the surface of the deep snow," considerably above the tree-growth l. As a contrast to this, one has been trapped by Mr. G. H . Caton Haigh in Wales among the rocks ou the shore near the mouth of an estuary, so that it seems equally at home in extremely varied localities. In spite, however, of its wide distribution and comparative disregard of extremes of climate and environment, it is one of those mammals which do not seem to have reached Tunis, Tripoli, or Egypt. The southern boundary of its range in Asia is uncertain. It has been reliably recorded from Wakhan on the Upper Oxus ; from Kashgar, in Eastern Turkestan; from Gilgit in the Upper Indus Valley; from Cherra Punji, India; from Kashmir; and from Kuatun, in North-west Fokien, Eastern China. It thus reaches the confines of the Orieutal Begion at more than one locality. Its presence in such isolated, yet widely separated, islauds as Iceland and Corsica (if, indeed, it be native in the former), seems to mark it as a species which has for long maintained a wide area of distribution, and which is of sufficient age to have already occupied the greater part of its present geographical range when the British Islands and their appendages, at least as far as the Shetlands, Outer Hebrides, St. Kilda, and Irelaud, still formed part of the Continent of Europe, and when there existed a free land-passage from Europe to North Africa by means of substantial land-bridges where now only islands remain. Japau alone seems to be old enough to have given it time for specific modification. This supposition gains support from the fact2 that its bones have been fouud in numerous caves on the Continent as well as in the English Forest-Bed of Norfolk, and elsewhere, as in the Ightbam Fissures of Kent, and that we have no trace of its ancestry, the Pleistocene species 31us orthodon Hensel and 3Ius lewisi E. T. Newton3 being at least as highly specialized as itself. The question as to whether this Mouse could be indigenous to Iceland I left an open one, since it seems likely that the connection between that islaud and the Shetlands must have been of far more 1 Proc. Zool. Soc. 1877, p. 279. 2 See A. Nehring's " Uebersicht iiber vierundzwanzig mitteleuropiiische Quartar-Faunen," Zeitschr. d. deutsch. geol. Gesellsch. Bd. xxxii. 1880, pp. 468- 509; also Brandt & J. N. Woldrich's "Diluviale europaisch-nordasiatische Saugothierfauna und ihre Beziehuugen zum Menschen," M e m . Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Petersbourg, xxxv. I. p. 69 (1887). 3 Quart. Journ. Geol. SOCTQI. 1. pt. 2, no. 198 (May 1, 1894). |