GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 317 
regret is quite apart from all questions of sentiment; but just as 
we lament our ignorance of the species which in various lands have 
been extirpated by our predecessors, so our posterity will want to 
know much more of the present avifauna of New Zealand than we 
can possibly record, for no one can pretend to predict the scope of 
investigation which will be required, and required in vain, by 
naturalists in that future when New Zealand may be one of the 
great nations of the earth.? 
Il. The Australian Region has but little intimate connexion with 
New Zealand, and is as trenchantly divided from the Indian, 
which geographically, and possibly geologically, seems to be conter- 
minous with it, by the narrow but deep channel that separates the 
small islands of Bali and Lombok, and will be found to determine 
the boundary between these two distinct Regions. Midway along 
this channel we may draw an imaginary line, and produce it ina 
north-north-easterly direction through the Strait of Macassar, dividing 
Borneo from Celebes. An interchange of animal forms in the two 
islands last named is indeed to be observed, and even a slight inter- 
mingling of the productions of the two former seems to be now 
going on, but to a much less degree than obtains between any other 
two Regions, while the characteristic, not to say peculiar, zoological 
types which occupy either side of this line, are so divergent that it 
may be fairly deemed more definite than any to be found elsewhere. 
Between Bali and Lombok, as above stated, it has been shewn by 
Mr. Wallace to be all but perfect, and in his honour this boundary 
was most justly named by Prof. Huxley (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1868, 
p. 313) “ Wallace’s Line.” As it proceeds northward it becomes 
less definite, though we know it to run between the Philippine 
Islands and Sanguir, and again between the former and the Palau 
(Pelew) group, its further progress in that direction being to the 
westward of the Ladrones. But hereabouts we lose it, until we 
reach the Sandwich Islands, the Fauna of which, in deference to 
usage, may perhaps be still accounted Australian, though apparently 
Neogean at bottom, and subsequently overlaid by Holarctic forms.® 
Thence the line must be drawn so as to include all of what is 
1 See Sir Walter Buller’s Birds of New Zealand. London: 1873, 4to (with 
beautifully coloured plates); ed. 2, London: 1888, 2 vols. fol. ; and Manual of 
the Birds of New Zealand. New Zealand: 1882, 8vo, as well as many papers 
by various authors in the 7ransactions of the New Zealand Institute from 1868 
onward. 
? Its existence was first indicated by Mr. Wallacein The Ibis for 1859 (p. 450). 
He subsequently (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1863, p. 481) insisted on its importance, which 
was fully shewn in his Malay Archipelago. 
3 Cf. Dr. Gadow’s ‘‘ Remarks on the Structure of certain Hawaiian Birds” in 
Wilson’s Birds of the Sandwich Islands. A similar conclusion had been before 
reached by Messrs. Sharp and Blackburn in their memoir on Hawaiian Coleoptera 
(Trans. R. Dubl. Soc. ser. 2, iii. part 6, pp. 119-300). 
