A FOSSIL CONTINENT. 685 



Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day. The very fact that Aus- 

 tralia incloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose con- 

 geners once inhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to 

 prove beyond question that uninterrupted land communication 

 must once have existed between Australia and those distant con- 

 tinents. 



In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace's 

 Line, from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reach- 

 ing zoological importance, separates what is called by science " the 

 Australian province " on the southwest from " the Indo-Malayan 

 province " to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea di- 

 vides off sharply the plants and animals of the Australian type 

 from those of the common Indian and Burmese pattern. South 

 of Wallace's line we now find several islands, big and small, in- 

 cluding New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the Moluccas, Celebes, 

 Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whose precise geo- 

 graphical position on the map must of course be readily remem- 

 bered, in this age of school-boards and universal examination, by 

 every pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by 

 minor straits of much shallower water ; but they all stand on a 

 great submarine bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of 

 the same wide Australian continent, because the animals of Aus- 

 tralian type are still found in every one of them. No Indian or 

 Malayan animal, however, of the larger sort (other than birds) 

 is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's Line. That nar- 

 row belt of deep sea, in short, forms an ocean barrier which has 

 subsisted there without alteration ever since the end of the Sec- 

 ondary period. From that time to this, as the evidence shows us, 

 there has never been any direct land communication between 

 Australia and any part of the outer world beyond that narrow 

 line of division. 



Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by sur- 

 prise for a moment, under the audacious title of " Captain Law- 

 son's Adventures in New Guinea." The gallant captain, or his 

 unknown creator in some London lodging, pretended to have ex- 

 plored the Papuan jungles, and there to have met with marvelous 

 escapes from terrible beasts of the common tropical Asiatic pat- 

 tern — rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards. Everybody 

 believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists. 

 Those canny folk saw through the wicked hoax on the very first 

 blush of it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must have 

 got there by an overland route. If there had ever been a land- 

 connection between New Guinea and the Malay region, then, since 

 Australian animals range into New Guinea, Malayan animals 

 would have ranged into Australia, and we should find Victoria 

 and New South Wales at the present day peopled by tapirs, orang- 



