Northern Zone.—With Dr. Günther we may recognize first the Northern Zone, characterized familiarly by the presence of sturgeon, salmon, trout, whitefish, pike, lamprey, stickleback, and other species of which the genera and often the species are identical in Europe, Siberia, Canada, Alaska, and most of the United States, Japan, and China. This is subject to cross-division into two great districts, the first Europe-Asiatic, the second North American. These two agree very closely to the northward, but diverge widely to the southward, developing a variety of specialized genera and species, and both of them passing finally by degrees into the Equatorial Zone.
Still another line of division is made by the Ural Mountains in the Old World and by the Rocky Mountains in the New. In both cases the Eastern region is vastly richer in genera and species, as well as in autochthonous forms, than the Western. The reason for this lies in the vastly greater extent of the river basins of China and the Eastern United States, as compared with those of Europe or the Californian region.
Fig. 177.—Japanese Sea-horse, Hippocampus mohnikei Bleeker. Misaki, Japan.
Minor divisions are those which separate the Great Lake region from the streams tributary to the Gulf of Mexico; and in Asia, those which separate China from tributaries of the Caspian, the Black, and the Mediterranean.
Equatorial Zone.—The Equatorial Zone is roughly indicated by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Its essential feature is that of the temperature, and the peculiarities of its divisions are caused by barriers of sea or mountains.
Dr. Günther finds the best line of separation into two divisions to lie in the presence or absence of the great group of dace or minnows,[28] to which nearly half of the species of fresh-water fishes the world over belong. The entire group, now spread everywhere except in the Arctic, South America, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific, seems to have had its origin in India, from which region its genera have radiated in every direction.
The Cyprinoid division of the Equatorial Zone forms two districts, the Indian and the African. The Acyprinoid division includes South America, south of Mexico, and all the islands of the tropical Pacific lying to the east of Wallace's line. This line, separating Borneo from Celebes and Bali from Lompoe, marks in the Pacific the western limit of Cyprinoid fishes, as well as that of monkeys and other important groups of land animals. This line, recognized as very important in the distribution of land animals, coincides in general with the ocean current between Celebes and Papua, which is one of the sources of the Kuro Shiwo.
In Australia, Hawaii, and Polynesia generally, the fresh-water fishes are derived from marine types by modification of one sort or another. In no case, so far as I know, in any island to the eastward of Borneo, is found any species derived from fresh-water families of either the Eastern or the Western Continent. Of course, minor subdivisions in these districts are formed by the contour lines of river basins. The fishes of the Nile differ from those of the Niger or the Congo, or of the streams of Madagascar
or Cape Colony, but in all these regions the essential
character of the fish fauna remains the same.