of the world. Instead of these, it has Marsupials only: kangaroos and
opossums; wombats and the duckbilled Platypus. In birds it is almost as
peculiar. It has no woodpeckers and no pheasants--families which
exist in every other part of the world; but instead of them it has the
mound-making brush-turkeys, the honeysuckers, the cockatoos, and the
brush-tongued lories, which are found nowhere else upon the globe. All
these striking peculiarities are found also in those islands which form
the Austro-Malayan division of the Archipelago.
The great contrast between the two divisions of the Archipelago is
nowhere so abruptly exhibited as on passing from the island of Bali to
that of Lombock, where the two regions are in closest proximity. In Bali
we have barbets, fruit-thrushes, and woodpeckers; on passing over to
Lombock these are seen no more, but we have abundance of cockatoos,
honeysuckers, and brush-turkeys, which are equally unknown in Bali, or
any island further west. [I was informed, however, that there were a
few cockatoos at one spot on the west of Bali, showing that the
intermingling of the productions of these islands is now going on.] The
strait is here fifteen miles wide, so that we may pass in two hours from
one great division of the earth to another, differing as essentially in
their animal life as Europe does from America. If we travel from Java
or Borneo to Celebes or the Moluccas, the difference 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 constantly met with. In the latter none of these occur; but the
prehensile-tailed Cuscus is almost the only terrestrial mammal seen,
except wild pigs, which are found in all the islands, and deer (which
have probably been recently introduced) in Celebes and the Moluccas. The
birds which are most abundant in the Western Islands are woodpeckers,
barbets, trogons, fruit-thrushes, and leaf-thrushes; they are seen
daily, and form the great ornithological features of the country. In
the Eastern Islands these are absolutely unknown, honeysuckers and small
lories being the most common birds, so that the naturalist feels himself
in a new world, and can hardly realize that he has passed from the one
region to the other in a few days, without ever being out of sight of
land.
The inference that we must draw from these facts is, undoubtedly, that
the whole of the islands eastwards beyond Java and Borneo do essentially
form a part of a former Australian or Pacific continent, although some
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