20. The Steamboat New World. 21. Use of Parachutes in Mines. 22. Adulterations of Drugs. 23. To restore Decayed Ivory. 24. Ivory as an Article of Manufacture. 25. Flexible Ivory. 26. Air-Whistle. 27. Curious Electrical Phenomenon, 184-188
XVIII. List of Patents granted for Scotland from 22d March to 22d June 1850, 189
_Memorandum._--New Publications will be noticed in our next Number.
Owing to the large space occupied by the Proceedings of the British Association for the Promotion of Science, held at Edinburgh in the month of August, 1850, various interesting communications are delayed until the next number of the Philosophical Journal.
_Geographical Distribution of Animals._ By Professor LOUIS AGASSIZ.
The greatest obstacles in the way of investigating the laws of the distribution of organized beings over the surface of our globe, are to be traced to the views generally entertained about their origin. There is a prevailing opinion, which ascribes to all living beings upon earth one common centre of origin, from which it is supposed they, in the course of time, spread over wider and wider areas, till they finally came into their present state of distribution; and what gives this view a higher recommendation, in the opinion of most men, is the circumstance, that such a method of distribution is considered as revealed in our sacred writings. We hope, however, to be able to shew that there is no such statement in the Book of Genesis; that this doctrine of a unique centre of origin, and successive distribution of all animals is of very modern invention; and that it can be traced back for scarcely more than a century in the records of our science.
There is another view to which, more recently, naturalists have seemed to incline; viz., the assuming several centres of origin, from which organized beings were afterwards diffused over wider areas, in the same manner as according to the first theory, the difference being only in the assumption of several centres of dispersion instead of a single one.
We have recently been led to take a very different view of the subject, and shall presently illustrate the facts upon which the view rests. But before we undertake to introduce more directly this subject, there is another point which requires preliminary investigation, which seems to have been entirely lost sight of by all those, without exception, who have studied the geographical distribution of animals, and which seems to us to be the keystone of the whole edifice, whenever we undertake to reconstruct the primitive plan of the geographical distribution of animals and plants. The distribution of organized beings over the surface of our globe in its present condition cannot be considered in itself; and without an investigation, at the same time, of the geographical distribution of those organized beings which have existed in former geological periods, and had become extinct before those of the present creation were called into being. For it is well ascertained now that there is a natural succession in the plan of creation--an intimate connection between all the types of the different periods of the creation from its beginning up to this day; so much so, that the present distribution of animals and plants is the continuation of an order of things which prevailed for a time at an earlier period, but which came to an end before the existing arrangement of things was introduced.