Suggestions upon the Origin of the Australian 
Flora. 
By SPENCER Moors, B.Sc., F.LS. 
Or all the problems which have engaged the attention of those 
biologists for whom questions relating to the distribution of life upon 
our globe have possessed special interest, none has appealed with more 
fascinating insistence than that one which concerns the stocking of 
Australia with its animal and vegetable inhabitants. Many are the 
memoirs wherein this subject is treated either as a whole or in some 
special and subsidiary aspect. The former method, the method 
adopted, for instance, with so much brilhancy by Mr. Wallace, is, 
of course, the more satisfactory one, inasmuch as the same general 
principles must—due regard being paid to special circumstances in 
their application to each individual case—have been operative in all 
departments of both kingdoms of nature. But although only the 
scantiest reference to zoological problems is made in the following 
pages, it is believed that the views maintained in them are In no way 
discordant with the ascertained facts and recognised deductions of 
zoology: indeed, were this not the case, the task I have set myself 
would be a hopeless one. But it is otherwise difficult enough, involv- 
ing, as it does, rejection of views which have received such weighty 
advocacy, both here and on the Continent, as has raised or almost 
raised them into the rank of axioms of science. 
Before explaining my ideas, however, it will be necessary to dwell 
for a time upon one theory to which general adhesion has been given, 
in my opinion, without sufficient warrant. Basing their conclusions to 
some extent on zoological data, and swayed by the bias imparted by 
those data, botanists have assumed that the Australian flora is of a 
lower and less specialised type than that of the northern hemisphere 
and the tropical regions. It exists to-day, we are told, simply because 
it has remained isolated from the great land areas of the Old World, 
and but for this, an exotic flora would have overrun the island- 
continent as certainly as, without the interposition of the ocean, the 
Marsupial and Monotrematous fauna would have disappeared before 
the inroads of higher Mammalia better adapted to the conditions of 
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