i893. FAUNA AND FLORA OF AUSTRALIA. igi 



or New Calendonia, that the emigrants who had successfully 

 traversed the wide and shallow portion of the Tasman Sea should be 

 stayed by the narrower but profound waters from reaching Australia. 

 Similarly, a narrow but a deep strait intervenes between Fiji with 

 numerous species and Samoa with none, between the Solomons where 

 the genus is well represented and the Louisiades where it is absent. 

 The beaches of Queensland, as I can testify from personal observation, 

 are strewn by a constant drift of pumice accompanied by coco-nuts and 

 pearly nautilus shells. The coco-nuts might have floated from any 

 tropical island in the Pacific, the nautilus shells are only derivable 

 from the narrower limits of the Solomons, the Fijis, and the New 

 Hebrides, while the pumice must almost certainly be the product of 

 the active volcanoes of the New Hebridean group. It is therefore 

 obvious that in the Western Pacific the chief route of drifting objects 

 is that of the trade winds from N.E to S.W. To an objection that 

 the range of Placostyliis might be due to transmarine migration, it is 

 a sufficient answer to observe that this genus extends beyond and 

 across, but not parallel to, the direction of the principal agency of 

 dispersal in this region. Both birds and plants contribute evidence 

 of the homogeneity of the fauna and flora of these islands, and of 

 their distinctness from those of Australia. Among the former may 

 be quoted Merula and Aplonis, and especially the distribution, past 

 and present, in Lord Howe, Norfolk Island, and New Zealand 

 of. Nestor, Platycereus, Notornis, and Ocydromus.^° Of the botany 

 of Lord Howe Island it is especially to be remarked that, whereas 

 on Wallace's theory it should, lying nearest to Australia, be most 

 akin to that region, yet " those typical Australian families the 

 Leguminosae and the Myrtaceae are barely represented, whilst 

 the Proteaceae are said to be wholly wanting."" 



Upon these grounds I conjecture that an ancient continent, 

 separated on the west from Australia by the abysses of the Coral and 

 of the Tasman Seas, is represented by the Solomons, the Fijis, the 

 New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Lord Howe, and New Zealand, with 

 its outlying islands — an area that I have elsewhere'- proposed to call 

 the Melanesian Plateau, and upon part of which Forbes has more 

 recently conferred the name of Antarctica. '^ 



In conclusion, I would contend that New Zealand is associated 

 with the Solomons and the New Hebrides, firstly, as a member of 

 their volcanic system ; secondly, by community of fauna and flora ; 

 whereas to Australia it is related not at all physically, and to a foreign 

 and intrusive element biologically ; and that a theory which derives 

 the fauna and flora of New Zealand primarily from these archi- 

 pelagoes and remotely from New Guinea, necessitates fewer unproved 

 assumptions than that which derives them from Australia. 



C. Hedlev. 



1° R. Etheridge, Jun., " Lord Howe Island, General Zoology," p. 13. 



" R. Etheridge, Jun., op. cit., p. 108. ^^ Proc. Linn. Sjc. A'.S.IF. (2), vol. vii , 



1^ See Natural Science, vol. iii., p. 54. [p. 335. 



