i-,6 THE GREAT BARRIER REEF. 



'J 



Lord Howe Island, and ending some three hundred miles off the Australian coast. In 

 another work by Mr. Wallace, more recently seen by the author (the volume on " Australasia," 

 in Stanford's Compendium oj Geography), a more comprehensive chart shows that a more exten- 

 sive bank, with soundings of less than i,ooo fathoms, completely unites New Zealand, via Nor- 

 folk Island and the Ballona and Bampton Shoals, with the Barrier Reef and Torres Strait. The 

 presence of these shoal banks indicates, in Mr. Wallace's opinion, the former union of New 

 Zealand with New Guinea and the north-eastern, or tropical, portion of the Australian conti- 

 nent. The affinities of many smaller New Zealand birds and plants support this interpreta- 

 tion, their alliances being conspicuously with tropical Australian and New Guinea types, rather 

 than with temperate Australian species. Concerning the primeval union of New Zealand and 

 the North Australian areas, Mr. Wallace distinctly indicates that this union must have obtained 

 at a very remote period, and thus summarises his deductions. — 



" The total absence (or extreme scarcity) of mammals in New Zealand obliges us to place 

 its union with North Australia and New Guinea at a very remote epoch. We must either go 

 back to a time when Australia itself had not received the ancestral forms of its present marsupials 

 and monotremes, or we must suppose that the portion of Australia with which New Zealand 

 was connected was then itself isolated from the mainland and was then without a mammalian 

 population . . . We must on any supposition place the union very far back, to account 

 for the total want of identity between the winged birds of New Zealand and those peculiar to 

 Australia, and a similar want of accordance in the lizards, the fresh-water fishes, and the more 

 important insect groups of the two countries. From what we know of the long geological 

 duration of the generic types of these groups, we must certainly go back to the earlier portion 

 of the tertiary period at least, in order that there should be such a complete disseverance 

 as exists between the characteristic animals of the two countries ; and we must further suppose 

 that, since their separation, there has been no subsequent union, or sufficiently near approach, 

 to allow of any important intermigration, even of winged birds, between them." 



The author, through his recent residence in Queensland, has been in a position to draw 

 Mr. Wallace's attention to additional evidence recently derived from the fossil deposits of 

 that colony. This is no less than the discovery of remains of the nearest possible ally to 

 the New Zealand Kiwi, Apteryx, in the Queensland (Darling Downs) deposits. The type, of 

 which a few characteristic bones have so far been exhumed, has been described by Mr. C. W. 

 De Vis, the curator of the Brisbane Museum, in the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New 

 South Wales, Vol. VI., ser. 2, 1891, under the title of Metapteryx bifrons. This interesting 

 discovery had been preceded by the identification of bones, obtained from the same deposit, of a 

 species of Dinornis (generically identical with the New Zealand Moa), upon which Mr. De 

 Vis has conferred the name of Dinornis Quccnslandioe. A third type, differing in certain 

 peculiarities from Dinornis, has been associated with the separate generic title of Dromornis. 



