92 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 



and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond question 

 that uninterrupted land communication must once have 

 existed between Australia and those distant continents. 



In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as 

 Wallace's Line, from the great naturalist who first pointed 

 out its far-reaching zoological importance, separates what 

 is called by science ' the Australian province ' on the south- 

 west from ' the Indo-Malayan province ' to the north and 

 east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply the 

 plants and animals of the Australian type from those of 

 the common Indian and Burmese pattern. South of 

 Wallace's Line we now find several islands, big and small, 

 including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the Moluccas, 

 Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, 

 whose precise geographical position on the map must of 

 course be readily remembered, in this age of school boards 

 and universal examination, by every pupil-teacher and every 

 Girton girl, are now divided by minor straits of much 

 shallower water ; but they all stand on a great submarine 

 bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same 

 wide Australian continent, because animals of the Austra- 

 lian type are still found in every one of them. No Indian 

 or Malayan animal, however, of the larger sort (other than 

 birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's 

 Line. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an 

 ocean barrier which has subsisted there without alteration 

 ever since the end of the secondary period. From that 

 time to this, as the evidence shows us, there has never been 

 any direct land communication betw^een Australia and any 

 part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division. 



Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world 

 by surprise for a moment, under the audacious title of 

 * Captain Lawson's Adventures in New Guinea.' The 

 gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London 



