CHAP. XX CELEBES 455 



stretches out from the Siamese and Malayan peninsula as 

 far as Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and the Philippines. To 

 the east another bank unites New Guinea and the Papuan 

 Islands as far as Aru, Mysol, and Waigicu, with Australia ; 

 while the Moluccas and Timor groups are surrounded by 

 much deeper water, which forms, in the Banda and 

 Celebes Seas and perhaps in other parts of this area, great 

 basins of enormous depths (2,000 to 3,000 fathoms or even 

 more) enclosed by tracts under a thousand fathoms, which 

 separate the basins from each other and from the adjacent 

 Pacific and Indian Oceans (see map). This peculiar 

 formation of the sea-bottom probably indicates that this 

 area has been the seat of great local upheavals and 

 subsidences ; and it is quite in accordance with this view 

 that we find the Moluccas, while closely agi-eeing with 

 New Guinea in their forms of life, yet strikingly deficient 

 in many important groups, and exhibiting an altogether 

 poverty-stricken appearance as regards the higher animals. 

 It is a suggestive fact that the Philippine Islands bear an 

 exactly parallel relation to Borneo, being equally deficient 

 in many of the higher groups ; and here too, in the Sooloo 

 Sea, we find a similar enclosed basin of great depth. 

 Hence we may in both cases connect, on the one hand, 

 the extensive area of land-surface and of adjacent shallow 

 sea with a long period of stability and a consequent rich 

 development of the forms of life ; and, on the other hand, 

 a highly broken land-surface with the adjacent seas of 

 great but very unequal depths, with a period of distur- 

 bance, probably involving extensive submersions of the land^ 

 resulting in a scanty and fragmentary vertebrate fauna. 



Zoology of Celebes. — The zoology of Celebes differs so 

 remarkably from that of both the great divisions of the 

 Archipelago above indicated, that it is very difficult to 

 decide in which to place it. It possesses only about 

 sixteen species of terrestrial mammalia, so that it is at 

 once distinguished from Borneo and Java by its extreme 

 poverty in this class. Of this small number four belong 

 to the Moluccan and Australian fauna — there being two 

 marsupials of the genus Cuscus, and two forest rats said 

 to be allied to Australian types. 



