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

;r.] THYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 11probably reaching as far as the present 100-fathom line ofsoundings.The Philippine Islands agree in many resjDects with Asia andthe other islands, but present some anomalies, which seem toindicate that they were separated at an earlier period, andhave since been subject to many revolutions in their physicalgeography.Turning our attention now to the remaining portion of theArchipelago, we shall find that all the islands from Celebes andLombock eastward exhibit almost as close a resemblance toAustralia and Kew Guinea as the Western Islands do to Asia.It is well known that the natural productions of Australia difierfrom those of Asia more than those of any of the four ancientquarters of the world diifer from each other. Australia, in fact,stands alone : it possesses no apes or monkeys, no cats or tigers,wolves, bears, or hyenas ; no deer or antelopes, sheep or oxenno elephant, horse, squirrel, or rabbit ; none, in shoi't, of thosefamiliar tj'pes of c^uadruped which are met with in every otherpart of the world. Instead of these, it has Marsupials only,kangaroos and ojDOSsums, wombats and the duck-billed Platypus.In birds it is almost as peculiar. It has no woodj^eckers and nopheasants, families which exist in every other part of the world ;but instead of them it has the mound-making brush-turkeys, thehoneysuckers, the cockatoos, and the brush-tongued lories, whichare found nowhere else iipon the globe. All these striking peculiaritiesare found also in those islands which form the Austro-Malayan division of the Archipelago.The great contrast Ijetween the two divisions of the Archipelagois nowhere so abruptlj- exhibited as on passing from theisland of Bali to that of Lombock, where the two regions are inclosest proximity. In Bali we have barbets, fruit-thrushes, andwoodpeckers ;on passing over to Lombock these are seen nomore, but we have abundance of cockatoos, honeysuckers, andbrush-turkej's, which are equally unknown in Bali,^ or any islandfurther west. The strait is here fifteen miles wide, so that wemay pass in two hours from one great division of the earth toanother, diflfering as essentially in their animal life as Europedoes from America. If we travel from Java or Borneo to Celebesor the Moluccas, the difierence is still more striking. In the first,the forests abound in monkeys of many kinds, wild cats, deer,civets, and otters, and numerous varieties of squirrels are constantlymet with. In the latter none of these occur ; but thealmost the only terrestrial mammalprehensile-tailed cuscus isseen, except wild pigs, which are found in all the islands, anddeer (which have probably been recently introduced) in Celebesand the Moluccas. The birds which are most abundant in theWestern Islands are woodpeckers, barbets, trogons, fruit-I I was informed, however, that there were a few cockatoos at one spot on the westof Bali, showing that the intermingling of the productions of these islands is nowgoing on.