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sea that covers the Sahul-bank. This bank is laid bare when the 
sealevel sinks + 70 m. 
In various writings I have tried to show that this condition was 
brought about in the pliocene and that the present status of land 
and water was developed in the pleistocene *). 
Also P. and F. Sarasin assume, in their wellknown work on 
Celebes, a pliocene “Festlands-epoche” for the Archipelago, and 
R. D. M. Verserk wrote that at this day, and presumably ever 
since the Pliocene New-Guinea was separated from Australia by a 
shallow sea. Other writers (e.g. Heprey and Marrarws) seem to be 
satistied in referring this occurrence to the “late Tertiary”. 
It was generally supposed that the process consisted in more or 
less local upheaval or subsidence of land or sea. Instead of these 
rather unfounded surmises, born of the wish to be able to dispose 
of land-connections, necessary for the zoogeographical theories, the 
Croni-Penck theory gives us a general view, yielding an actual 
basis. However, with this the supposed positive or negative sub- 
sidence is at the same time shifted from the Pliocene to the Pleisto- 
cene. This again lends support to our statement that the facts 
observed by Zoology speak for the validity of the CROLL-PrNCK 
theory. 
1) A short survey of these speculations will soon be published in the Sitzungs- 
berichte d. Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. 
