304 ANTARCTICA: A VANISHED AUSTRAL LAND. 



in deeply poetic language — unexpected in a subject so abstruse — an. 

 superbly illustrated by his own band, which he communicated to thi 

 Zoological, the Liimeau, and the Royal societies of London throughout 

 his life, he has published his labors on tLe embryology of some of th 

 birds most typical of Australia — its piping crows, its warblers, ai 1 

 wood swallows. He devoted himself especially to the investigation >f 

 the cranial constitution of birds from the very early stages of tbeir 

 existence, for he believed that " the outward form of the face gives t'le 

 keynote to the whole bird; the head and' face rule all things else, jrid 

 every modification in the organs of progression must be in correlation 

 with that deeper change which has taken place in the storied and 

 labyrinthine walls of the head." lie has unfolded their lineage as surely 

 as if he had witnessed its growth through the vistas of the past by 

 watching the laying together of each sep. rate element before ''nature 

 with her cementing osteoblasts had obliierated their individuality." 

 His penetrating eye detected the existence and recognized the signifi- 

 cance to their pedigree of those structures, useless to the individual 

 save that each new life must inexorably ascend by all the stairs its 

 sires have climbed before it, which within the secrecy of the egg ai)pear 

 but for an hour and vanish as if they had never been. The pedigree 

 of the Australian piping crows arises, he finds, from the same stock 

 as the South American creepers {Dendrocolaptida^) ; that of the wood 

 swallows oscillates between the ground thrushes {Pitta) of the Malayan 

 Archipelago and the South American ant thrushes; while the affinities 

 of the Australian warblers are with the wood warblers {Mniotiltidw) of 

 South America, all of them declaring their afitinity with forms in the 

 Southern and not in the Northern Hemispheie — with groups whose 

 homes are not on land areas continuous to their own, but in regions 

 separated by wide seas, and at their farthest limits apart. 



Such is the singular disconnected distribution of many undoubtedly 

 related groups of birds, of a^ hich I shall presently proceed to offer an 

 explanation. 



Before doing so I wish to refer shortly to other sections of the ani- 

 mal kingdom. It is well known that Australia is the great home of 

 those lowly mammals, the marsupials, the survivors of a family whose 

 ancestry dates back to the Trias, a period to be reckoned only in ages, 

 each perhaps of thousands of centuries. They are remarkable, as an 

 order, for containing " isomorphs," or groups that have tlie form and 

 habits of many of the various other orders of the animal kingdom. 

 The kangaroo rats, for instance, assume the outward form of our com- 

 mon rats and mice; others, such as the beautiful Hying phalangers, 

 resemble the insectivora; while yet others, as the "Tasmanian dev^ 

 are large, carnivorous, and wolf-like. liesides the Austromalaya, 

 region (which is a jiart of the Australasian realm), no region of the 

 globe now (contains any representative of those implacental animals, 

 except the South American forests (from which two species have wan- 



