The Malay archipelago : the land of the orang-utan ... - Wallace Online

108 THE ]\IALAY ARCHIPELAGO. [chap.carried. Others can float a long time unhurt in the water, andare drifted by winds and currents to distant shores. Pigeons,and other fruit-eating birds, are also the means of distributingplants, since the seeds readily germinate after passing throughtheir bodies. It thus hai^pens that plants which grow on shoresand lowlands have a wide distribution, and it requires anextensive knowledge of the species of each island to determinethe relations of their floras with any approach to accuracy. Atpresent we have no such complete knowledge of the botany ofthe several islands of the Archipelago ; and it is only by suchstriking phenomena as the occurrence of northern and evenEuropean genera on the summits of the Javanese mountainsthat we can jjrove the former connexion of that island with theAsiatic continent. With land animals, liowever, the case is verydifierent. Their means of passing a wide expanse of sea are farmore restricted. Their distribution has been more accuratelystudied, and we possess a much more complete knowledge of suchgroups as mammals and birds in most of the islands, than we doof the plants. It is these two classes which will supply us withmost of our facts as to the geographical distribution of organizedbeings in this region.The number of Mammalia known to inhabit the Indo-Malayregion is very considerable, exceeding 170 species. With tlieexception of the bats, none of tliese have any regular means ofpassing arms of the sea many miles in extent, and a considerationof their distribution must therefore greatly assist us in determiningwhether these islands have ever been connected ^\ith eachother or with the continent since the epoch of existing species.The Quadrumana or monkey tribe form one of the mostcharacteristic features of this region. Twenty-four distinctspecies are known to inhabit it, and these are distributed withtolerable uniformity over the islands, nine being found in Java,ten in the Malay peninsula, eleven in Sumatra, and thii'teen inBorneo. The great man-like Orang-utans are found only inSumatra and Borneo ;the curious Siamang (next to them insize) in Sumatra and Malacca ; the long-nosed monkey only inBorneo ;while every island has representatives of the Gibbonsor long-ai-med apes, and of monkeys. The lemur-like animals,Nycticebus, Tarsius, and Galeopithecus, are found in all theislands.Seven species found on the Malay peninsula extend also intoSumatra, four into Borneo, and three into Java ; while two rangeinto Siam and Burmah, and one into North India. With theexception of the Oi-ang-utan, the Siamang, the Tarsius spectrum,and the Galeopithecus, all the Malayan genera of Quadrumanaare represented in India by closely allied species, although,owing to the limited range of most of these animals, so few areabsolutely identical.Of Carnivora, thirty-three species are known from the Indo-Malay region, of which about eight are found also in Burmah