Tournefort first remarked and Humboldt, the great organizer of
the science of natural history geography, demonstrated, that zones of
elevation on mountains correspond to parallels of latitude, the higher with
the more northern or southern, as the case might be. It is well known that
this correspondence is recognized in the general 'facies' of the flora and
fauna, dependent on generic identities. But when announcing and
illustrating the law that climatal zones of animal and vegetable life are
mutually repeated or represented by elevation and latitude, naturalists have
not hitherto sufficiently (if at all) distinguished between the evidence of
that law, as exhibited by 'representative species' and by 'identical'. In
reality, the former essentially depend on the law, the latter being an
'accident' not necessarily dependent upon it, and which has hitherto not
been accounted for. In the case of the Alpine flora of Britain, the
evidence of the activity of the law, and the influence of the accident, are
inseparable, the law being maintained by a transported flora, for the
transmission of which I have shown we can not account by an appeal to
unquestionable geological events. In the case of the Alps and Carpathians,
and some other mountain ranges, we find the law maintained partly by a
representative flora, special in its region, i.
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