ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 299 



by Mr. A. E. Wallace ou the east and west sides of wliat is known as 

 Wallace's Line, which separates the two Malayan islands of Bali and 

 Lombock. The strait that separates these islands is so narrow that, 

 standing on the vessel's deck, the voyager to the southward has an 

 excellent view of the land on both sides, and can admire the richly 

 forest-clad and shapely volcanic cones of Agong and Eiiyani that 

 tower into the blue on his right hand and on his left. To "the eastern 

 side of this line," Mr. Wallace writes, " the fauna and the flora, and 

 even the people, are essentially Australian; to the western side, as 

 essentially Asiatic." On crossing this narrow passage from west to 

 east " we at once meet with those singular birds, the mound builders 

 (Megapodidce), as well as friar birds and other honeysuckers, cockatoos, 

 and many other groups found only in the Australian regions; while a 

 large number of animals found in everyone of the Asiatic islands sud- 

 denly disappear. We have no longer any elephants, rhinoceroses, or 

 tigers; none of the carnivora but a common civet cat (probably intro- 

 duced); none of the insectivora but a small shrew; none of the num- 

 erous rodents but one or two squirrels." Yet in the island of Timor, 

 farther to the east and near to Australia, one is surprised to discover 

 that, as Mr. Wallace points out, the characteristic mammals of Aus- 

 tralia are quite as much wanting as those of Asia. " Birds," he 

 remarks, " however, having the means of passing freely over narrow 

 arms of the sea, have not been excluded, and, notwithstanding the sim- 

 ilarity in climate and vegetation to Australia, the birds and insects of 

 Timor more resemble those of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas." These 

 islands are hundreds of miles apart, and yet have an interchange, 

 according to Mr. Wallace, of many birds and insects; while from Bali 

 and Lombock, which gaze on each other across a narrow arm of the 

 sea, there has been, when the distances apart of the two localities are 

 compared, only a slight interchange. In South America again we have 

 genera of monkeys and birds living in abundance along one bank of a 

 river, which apparently find this comi)aratively narrow line of water 

 an impassable barrier. 



Li a paper contributed to The Fortnightly Review in May last I 

 referred to the discovery in the Chatham Islands (near New Zealand) 

 of the subfossil remains of birds which were up to that time known to 

 have lived only a few hundred years since in the Mascarene Islands 

 as confirming the belief that there must have existed in the southern 

 seas an extensive continuous land similar to that in the Northern 

 Hemisphere, on which the common ancestors of the forms unknown 

 north of the equator, but confined to one or more of the southern 

 extremities of the great continents, lived and multiplied, and whence 

 they could disperse in all directions. "This lost continent," 1 observed 

 then, "I am constrained to believe from evidence which space does 

 not on the present occasion permit me to adduce, lies in part beneath 

 the southern ice cap, and it approached to or included the Antarctic 



