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

218 THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO. [chap.these distant countries. Now it is a curious fact, that theexistence of such a land has been ah'eady thought necessaryto account for the distribution of the curious Quadrumanaforming the family of the Lemurs. These have their metropolisin Madagascar, but are found also in Africa, in Ceylon, in thepeninsula of India, and in the Malay Archipelago as far asCelebes, whicli is its furthest eastern limit. Dr. Sclater hasproposed for the hypothetical continent connecting thesedistant points, and whose former existence is indicated bythe Mascarene islands and the Maldive coral group, the nameof Lemuria. Whether or no we believe in its existence in theexact form here indicated, the student of geographical distributionmust see in the extraordinary and isolated productions ofCelebes proofs of the former existence of some continent fromwhence the ancestors of these creatures, and of many otherintermediate forms, could have been derived.^In this short sketch of the most striking peculiarities of theNatural History of Celebes, I have been obliged to enter muchinto details that I fear will have been uninteresting to thegeneral reader, but unless I had done so my exposition wouldhave lost much of its force and value. It is by these detailsalone that I have been able to prove the unusual features thatCelebes presents to us. Situated in the very midst of anArchipelago, and closely hemmed in on evexy side by islandsteeming with varied forms of life, its productions have yet asurprising amount of individuality. While it is poor in theactual number of its species, it is yet wonderfully rich inpeculiar forms, many of which are singular or beautiful, andare in some cases absolutely unique upon the globe. We beholdhere the curious phenomenon of groups of insects changingtheir outline in a similar manner when compared with those ofsurrounding islands, suggesting some common cause wliichnever seems to have acted elsewhere in exactly the same way.Celebes, therefore, presents us with a most striking example ofthe interest that attaches to the study of the geographicaldistribution of animals. We can see that their present distributionu]ion the globe is the result of all the more recentchanges the earth's surface has undergone ;and by a carefulstudy of the phenomena we are sometimes able to deduceapproximately what those past changes must have been, inorder to produce the distribution we find to exist. In thecomparatively simple case of the Timor group, . we were ableto deduce these changes with some approach to certainty. Inthe much more complicated case of Celebes we can only indicatetheir general nature, since we now see the result, iiot of anysingle or recent change only, but of a whole series of the laterrevolutions which have resulted in the present distribution ofland in the Eastern Hemisphere.1 I have since come to the conclusion that no such connecting land as Lemuria isrequired to explain the facts. (See iny Island Life, pages 395 and 427.)