high order of artistry, at least a thinker of rare originality and imaginative power. We cannot here follow Mr Dobell and others in their pursuit of parallels between Traherne and later philosphers and poets-how in many of his fancies and speculations he anticipates not only Wordsworth, but Berkeley and Rousseau, Blake, Browning, and Whitman. Let what Mr Dobell calls a clear prevision of the Berkeleian philosophy' serve as an instance of the possibilities of such quests. All Nature's treasures, writes Traherne,

'Were my immediate and internal pleasures,
Substantial joys which did inform my mind.
With all she wrought

My soul was fraught;

And every object in my heart a thought
Begot, or was: I could not tell

Whether the things did there
Themselves appear,

Which in my spirit truly seemed to dwell,
Or whether my conforming mind

Were not even all that therein shin'd.'

The form in this, as in the rest of the poems, may leave something to be desired, but the thought is fine, and is a fair sample of the many precious things which the patient reader will discover in Mr Dobell's volume. Both Traherne and his editor, as we have hinted, make some demands on our patience, but nowhere to such an extent as to forfeit our interest. The long introduction, notwithstanding some critical indiscretions, is full of matter; and no one can fail to be held by the story of the discovery, or to be convinced by the proofs of the poet's identification. Should the reader, on the strength of the passages quoted in the introduction, come to the same conclusion as ourselves, that Traherne is a better prosewriter than poet, Mr Dobell cannot complain. He promises an early issue of the 'Centuries of Meditations,' and he has revealed enough of their contents to give us assurance that in Traherne's prose manuscripts he possesses, if anything, a greater treasure than his poetry. W. LEWIS JONES.

Art. VII.-THE ANIMALS OF AFRICA.

1. On the Classification and Distribution of the Alectoromorpha and Heteromorpha. By T. H. Huxley. Proceedings of the Zoological Society. London, 1868.

2. Text-book of Paleontology. By K. A. von Zittel. Translated and edited by C. R. Eastman. Vols I and II. London: Macmillan, 1900 and 1902.

3. Anniversary Address to the Geological Society. By W. T. Blanford. Proc. Geol. Soc. London, 1890.

4. Geological and Faunal Relations of Europe and America during the Tertiary Period, and the Theory of Successive Invasions of an African Fauna. By H. F. Osborn. 'Science,' Series 2, vol. XI, 1900.

5. Extinct Vertebrates from Egypt. By C. W. Andrews. 'Geological Magazine,' Decade 4, vol. VIII, 1901.

6. Note on Arsinoetherium zitteli from the Eocene of Egypt. By H. J. L. Beadnell. Cairo Survey Dept., 1902.

7. The Law of Adaptive Radiation. By H. F. Osborn. 'American Naturalist,' vol. XXXVI, 1902.

8. On Okapia, a New Genus of Giraffidæ from Central Africa. By E. Ray Lankester. Transactions of the

Zoological Society. London, 1902.

9. The Evolution of the Proboscidea. By C. W. Andrews. Philosophical Transactions, B., vol. 196, 1903.

DURING the past few years the zoological world has been startled by the announcement of the discovery in centraleastern Africa of an entirely new type (so far as existing animals are concerned) of giraffe-like ruminant, the okapi (fig. 1), and also, in the north-eastern part of the same continent, of the remains of a number of extinct mammals unlike any previously known to science, the latter remains having been obtained from strata of lower Tertiary or Eocene age in the Libyan desert. The okapi, as a living mammal of large size, peculiar shape, and strange colouring, has naturally attracted a large share of popular attention; whereas the extinct forms, in spite of their strangeness, have been but little noticed by the general public.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the discovery of these extinct Egyptian Eocene mammals far outweighs in importance that of the okapi. For instance, certain

fossil ruminants from the Pliocene formations of Greece, Samos, and elsewhere, are so nearly allied in structure to the okapi that the discovery of a living representative, interesting and important as it undoubtedly is, has added little or nothing to our knowledge of the general structure and affinities of the group. It is true that the dry bones of its extinct kindred would never have enabled us to guess at the strange and bizarre coloration of the living okapi, any more than would those of extinct giraffes have

permitted us to predicate the nature of the colouring of their existing representatives. But coloration, although of great interest from many points of view, is in the main correlated merely with the adaptation of animals to their natural surroundings, and has little or nothing to do with their general structure and relationships. Moreover, no comparison is possible in this respect between the recent and extinct members of a group. While fully admitting the interest attaching to the okapi, it must therefore be confessed that zoological science would not

have been very greatly the poorer had the creature never been discovered.

On the other hand, the extinct mammals from the Eocene of the Fayum district of the Libyan desert have enabled us to solve a problem which, from the very nature of the case, had hitherto puzzled the ingenuity of the cleverest of zoologists and palæontologists—to wit, the origin of the elephants and their extinct relatives the mastodons. Till the discovery of these wonderful Fayum skulls, bones, and teeth, the Proboscidea, as the elephants and their extinct allies are termed in zoology, formed an entirely isolated group-a kind of no-man's child-whose ancestry it was impossible even to conjecture, although it was known that they were nearly related to the typical ungulates, or hoofed mammals. Our new information enables us to bring them into line with that group, and to point to ancestral forms not differing very widely from several well-known generalised types, although all the branches of the ancestral tree cannot yet be traced into complete connexion with the parent stem. Incidentally, it may be added, these discoveries have enabled Dr Andrews to trace out the evolution of that most wonderful organ, the elephant's trunk.

Nor is this by any means all; for these Egyptian fossils have furnished strong indications of the existence of an affinity between the ancestral Proboscidea and the marine Sirenia, of which latter the manati and the dugong are the sole existing survivors. Although such an affinity had been previously suspected, it had of late years been overlooked; and it was reserved for Dr Andrews to point out how many remarkable resemblances exist between even the existing members of the two groups. As it is, the evidence is not yet fully worked out, but there is good reason to believe that ere long we shall regard manatis and dugongs as nothing more than a highly aberrant and aquatic modification of the proboscidean stock.

To take another instance of the importance of these discoveries: the hyraces-the miscalled coneys of Scripture -forming the Hyracoidea of zoologists, were till lately regarded as another altogether isolated group of ungulate mammals of which the past history was an absolute blank. The aforesaid palæontological discoveries in Upper Egypt, as well as others made a few years earlier in Samos and

certain parts of southern Europe, have, however, brought to light the former existence of a whole host of ancestral forms, some of which were of large bodily dimensions; and there seems a probability that this group, too, may prove to be more or less intimately related to the Proboscidea.

This is one aspect of the subject; but there is a second, and not less important aspect, from which the discovery of both the okapi and the aforesaid extinct Egyptian mammals may be regarded. It throws a light on the question of the source whence Africa derived its existing mammalian fauna. In other words, is this fauna wholly or partly indigenous, and has it been a source of supply for other regions of the Old World? or are its members (all or some) comparatively recent immigrants into the Dark Continent from other countries? It is from this point of view that the animals of Africa-and by 'animals' I mean mainly mammals—will generally be regarded in the present article.

Next to Australasia and South America, that portion of Africa lying to the south of the Sahara desert, together with the southern half of the Arabian peninsula (which evidently forms a part of the same great zoological province), differs, indeed, much more decidedly, in respect to the animals by which it is inhabited, from the other three continents of the world than does any one of the latter from the remaining two. Ethiopian Africa, as this portion of the great southern continent is termed by students of animal distribution, is in part the home of a very large number of species and groups of animals quite unknown (with the exception of the comparatively few met with in southern Arabia) elsewhere at the present day. And the question as to the mode in which this peculiarity of the fauna originated is one which has of late years attracted much attention on the part of naturalists. Needless to say, the conditions of the problem have been profoundly modified by the discovery of the Eocene fauna of the Fayum district.

At the outset it may be well to state that the difference between the mammalian fauna of Ethiopian Africa and that of the northern hemisphere generally is in no wise comparable to that which exists between the animals of