462 ISLAND LIFE 



continent or extensive land ; and, both by what it has and 

 what it wants, occupies such an exactly, intermediate 

 position between the Oriental and Australian regions that 

 it will perhaps ever remain a mere matter of opinion with 

 which it should j^roperly be associated. Forming, as it 

 does, the western limit of such typical Australian groups 

 as the Marsupials among mammalia, and the Tricho- 

 glossidse and Meliphagidie among birds, and being so 

 strikingly deficient in all the more characteristic Oriental 

 families and genera of both classes, I have always placed 

 it in the Australian Region ; but it may perhaps with 

 equal propriety be left out of both till a further knowledge 

 of its geology enables us to determine its early history 

 with more precision. 



Peculiarities of the Insects of Celches. — The only other 

 class of animals in Celebes, of which we have a tolerable 

 knowledge, is that of insects, among which we meet with 

 peculiarities of a very remarkable kind, and such as are 

 found in no other island on the globe. Having already 

 given a full account of some of these peculiarities in a 

 paper read before the Linnean Society — republished in my 

 Contributions to the Theory of Ncitural Selection, — while 

 others have been discussed in my Georjrci'phical Dis- 

 tribution of Animals (Vol. I. p. 434) — I will only here 

 briefly refer to them in order to see whether they accord 

 with, or receive any explanation from, the somewhat novel 

 view of the past history of the island here advanced. 



The general distribution of the two best known groups 

 of insects — the butterflies and the beetles — agrees very 

 closely with that of the birds and mammalia, inasmuch 

 as Celebes forms the eastern limit of a number of Asiatic 

 and Malayan genera, and at the same time the western 

 limit of several Moluccan and Australian genera, the 

 former perhaps preponderating as in the higher animals. 



Himalayan Types of Birds and Butterflies in Celebes. — 

 A curious fact of distribution exhibited both amons^ butter- 

 flies and birds, is the occurrence in Celebes of species and 

 genera unknown to the adjacent islands, but only found 

 again when we reach the Himalayan mountains or the 

 Indian Peninsula. Among birds we have a small yellow 



