Abstract
IN his excellent “Geographische Mittheilungen,“Dr. Petermann has lately given us several zoo-geographical articles, as we may call them—such as those of Dr. Finsch on the distribution of Parrots, and of Freiherr von Heuglin on the Bird-fauna of North-eastern Africa. Both of these memoirs are the products of the highest authorities on the subjects to which they respectively relate, and deserve our warmest commendation. We cannot, however, say so much as to the merit of the paper upon the Geographical Distribution of Deer, which appears in a recent number of Dr. Petermann's journal. The authors of this memoir, which, if properly treated, is on a subject of very great interest, have, we fear, commenced to indulge in “generals” before having sufficiently got up their “particulars.” In the first part of their essay they point out the present distribution of the different genera and species of Cervidæ over the world's surface, and endeavour to show how they have descended from a common ancestral form. This form they imagine must have been the Moschidæ, upon the ground that in order to obtain a deer with horns we must pre-suppose the existence of a deer without horns, and the Moschidæ answer this definition. Unfortunately, however, the authors have not yet discovered that their so-called group Moschidæ is composed of two forms of animal life that have very little to do with one another. It has been shown most conclusively by the researches of M. Alphonse Milne-Edwards† in Paris, and Prof. Flower in our own country,‡ that the Chevrotains (Tragulus and Hyomoschus), one of the constituents of the Moschidæ of MM. Jaeger and Bessels, constitute a family per se, quite distinct from the rest of the ruminants, and connecting them with the pigs, and consequently quite distinct from the musk-deer (Moschus). In the same way our authors base certain arguments upon the fact of all the typical deer being spotted in the immature state. But, as Dr. Jaeger at least—having been, if we are not misinformed, custos of a zoological garden—ought to know, this is not quite the case, all the Rusine deer having their young spotless. Again, arguments are founded upon Cervus pudu of Chili living in the Cordilleras, and the other allied species with simple unbranched horns in the plains of South America. But exactly the contrary is the case. Cervus pudu is from the low maritime coast of Chili, and one, if not more, of the so-called “Subulones” (C. rufius) lives high in the Andes of Venezuela and New Granada. From these and other similar instances of erroneous statements which it would be easy to point out, it is, in fact, quite obvious that the authors of this essay have no very special acquaintance with the group upon the distribution of which they treat. We leave it to naturalists to decide whether, under these circumstances, the results arrived at are worthy of much attention. Their theory seems to be that the deer-family reached the New World by an Arctic continent which formerly connected northern Europe with eastern America, and which Dr. Jaeger, in a former paper, has proposed to call “Arctis.” There are, however, if we are not mistaken, equally good grounds for believing that the numerous, undoubtedly Old-world forms in North America reached it by immigration from North-western Asia.
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The Geographical Distribution of Deer * . Nature 3, 94 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/003094a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/003094a0