GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 37 



Curlew, and many others, abide upon the banks or disport in the open water, while 

 an advance guard of screaming Cockatoos, Ibises, Hawks, and other of the wilder 

 species, herald the approach of the intruding steamboat to their feathered kinsfolk 

 higher up or lower down the stream. 



So considerable a space has been devoted to certain more notable Australian 

 birds, such as the quaint More-porks, Piping Crows or Colonial Magpies, Giant King- 

 fishers, and other less prominent types, in a succeeding chapter, as to obviate 

 the necessity of further comment on them here. This observation will apply also 

 to the fish tribe, which has already received a share of notice with reference to the 

 several peculiar Australian types that, by virtue of the geographical distribution of 

 their nearest allies, point towards the pre-existence of a large central Antarctic 

 Continent whence many of the inhabitants of the more widely separated regions 

 of Australia, Africa and South America would appear to have primarily migrated. 



The flora or plant life of Australia is as strikingly distinct in its character as 

 the animal races. The vast forests of Eucalypti, embracing some 150 known species, 

 which form so characteristic a feature of the greater portion of the tree-producing 

 areas of Australia, represent in themselves a most ancient lineage, non-existent at 

 the present day outside the Australasian region, but whose members, as fossil deposits 

 teach us, formerly constituted a dominent feature in European forestry. The Bankseas, 

 Hakeas, and numerous other of the essentially Australian Proteacese, tell the same 

 tale, and further evidence in a similar direction might be adduced from the characteristic 

 Grass-trees, or " Blackboys," Xanthorraceee and Cycadacea?. The Heath tribe, Epacridae, 

 spice-perfumed Boronias and numerous other Diosmere, which clothe the more open 

 moorlands of Temperate Australia, are also to a preponderating extent unique. In 

 the tropics again the very characteristic Baobab or Bottle-tree, Adansonia rupestris, 

 peculiar to the northern territory of Western Australia, is of special interest with 

 relation to the fact that, in common with certain animal types previously referred to, 

 its nearest ally, Adansonia digitata, is indigenous to tropical Africa. A characteristic 

 representation of the Australian Baobab in full foliage is given in Plate V., while a 

 fuller reference to and additional illustrations of both this and other types of 

 Australian vegetation are relegated to a succeeding Chapter. 



Material evidence yielded by the vegetable kingdom in support of the notogeal 

 continental interpretation is contained in Mr. H. O. Forbes' Paper on the Chatham 

 Islands previously quoted. Taking plant groups that are confined, or nearly so, to 

 the Southern Hemisphere, Mr. Forbes remarks : " Among the Saxifrages, a genus 



