The Natural History of the European Seas - Edward Forbes

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 edition. Excerpt: ... receive such illustration as to make the Mediterranean basin and its contents more suggestive to the naturalist and the geologist than any other sea with which we are as yet acquainted. It is to such considerations as these that the present chapter will be mainly devoted. It will doubtless be a difficult matter with some naturalists to divest themselves so entirely of old prepossessions as to regard the fauna of this great internal sea merely as a subordinate and derivative one; such, however, it essentially is, and if we have heretofore viewed it otherwise, it has been owing doubtless to the circumstance that it has been so long known. It was on this account that with the rise of the present school of natural history investigation it became a typical region-- one to which reference was constantly made in all questions relating to the geographical distribution of European forms. Cuvier and Valenciennes, in their great work on Fishes, Deshayes, with respect to Molluscs, habitually speak of certain forms as ranging from the Mediterranean over a given region without, and so also with many others. This practice will probably be continued, nor will it be attended with any inconvenience, provided the expression does not mislead and induce the impression that the direction which an integral portion of the great Atlantic fauna has taken in its diffusion, was outwards from the Mediterranean, whereas it was the reverse. The Mediterranean Sea, viewed physically, is a vast lateral extension of the Atlantic, and its fauna is a full development of the most typical portion of the Lusitanian zone or province of that great ocean. In connection with its dependencies, terminating in the brackish waters of the sea of Azof, it repeats, and on a vast scale, ..