GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 



in correlation with this Antarctic continental hypothesis. The little group of the 

 Jacanas, greatly resembling and allied to the Rails, but with longer legs and toes of 

 such remarkable length and tenuity that the birds run with ease and great celerity 

 over the surface of the leaves of the water lilies and other aquatic plants, is one of 

 these. The typical genus Parra includes some dozen species which are inhabitants 

 of tropical Australia, Africa, and South America. Their power of flight is essentially 

 feeble, and they could not possibly have arrived at their present widely separated 

 areas of distribution, but for some previous land connection between their respective 

 habitats. A bird of a very different character, but possessing a similar notable 

 distribution, is the gigantic Crane or Jabiru, Mycteria australis. Like the Jacana it 

 is a denizen of tropical or sub-tropical Australia, Africa, and South America. As 

 was pointed out many years since by the late Professor Huxley, the essentially 

 south-continental parrot tribe possesses some nearly related family groups in both 

 Australasia and South America. 



There are certain other birds indigenous to Australia which, with reference 

 to their distribution further afield, yield, in a less degree, similarly suggestive 

 evidence. The little wood swallows, referable to the genus Artamus, belong to this 

 category. In addition to being found in Australia, where they are most abundantly 

 represented, various species occur in India and in the essentially African region of 

 Madagascar. A genus of true swallows, Atticora, also common in Australia, is yet 

 more significantly distributed, for it has, as with species previously cited, both the 

 South American and African continents recorded among its habitats. 



The fauna of Australia is of peculiar interest, viewed altogether apart from 

 those phenomena which appear to justify our regarding that territory as the isolated 

 residuum of a disrupted Antarctic Continent. As an indirect but collateral outcome 

 of that interpretation, it is found that Australia can lay claim to the possession within 

 its boundaries of a fauna that yields the palm to no other one on the earth's surface 

 in the matter of aristocratic and ancient lineage. 



The aboriginal population of Australia, such of it as still survives, is of itself 

 a standing monument of the high antiquity of that country's fauna. As is conceded 

 by the common consent of experts in ethnology, the Australian aboriginal represents 

 the most primitive type of humanity. He is, in fact, a surviving relic of the Stone 

 Age, who, in this huge isolated island, has, in company with the marsupial mammals, 

 preserved his primaeval simplicity down to the present date. Like all such less 

 civilised, or less effectively equipped, races, he is fast disappearing before the 



