Henry O. Forbes—Chatham Isles and the Antarctic Lands, 233 
‘Kemp Island, and Kerguelen Land to join the Ethiopian region, 
-either by the Mascarene Island-continent, with perhaps an African 
-commissure, or, perhaps, for a time with that continent directly. 
The South Atlantic Ocean would seem to extend far south into the 
Antaretic separating the Ethiopian prolongation from the South 
American enlargement, which included the Falkland Islands, South 
-Georgia, and the Sandwich Group, to Graham and Alexander Lands. 
But our knowledge of the sea floor south of Africa is still very 
imperfect.” 
“Tf it be true that Ice Ages and Genial Ages were alternate in the 
two hemispheres, as Sir R. Ball affirms, then when the Miocene 
“Southern Ice Age was at its height, the life in this southern continent 
would be driven towards or across the equator, and when in the 
late Miocene and in the Pliocene, the warm period (corresponding 
to the growing cold period of the northern hemisphere) was advan- 
-eing, and the land surface fit for peopling was increasing, there 
would be a slow return to the Antarctic land. Whether or not 
there was such a cold period, there must have succeeded a very mild 
-age—almost certainly during the height of the glacial age of the 
northern hemisphere—to enable the fauna and flora now common 
to the terminal areas of the three great continents to develop on a 
-southern land and to intermingle.” 
“The monotremes and marsupials in Australia are supposed by 
Mr. Wallace to have come to Western Australia at a very ancient 
period from Asia, vid a land connection across the Java Sea, and 
to have entered Hast Australia only in the Tertiary age after the 
union of the two islands. Nearly all our fossil remains, however, 
-of these groups are found in Hast Australia, and their present dis- 
tribution is in northern Austro-Malaya and Australia. Now there 
have been found in Patagonia, as already stated, in early Eocene 
times fossil remains, nearly allied to the carnivorous Thylacine of 
Tasmania and the dasyures, that occur both in Pliocene and Pleistocene 
-beds in Australia, or live now in Australia and Tasmania. No fossil 
remains of these southern forms have been found elsewhere out of 
Australia and Patagonia. It is not therefore at all improbable to 
‘suppose that the South American Thylacine-like forms multiplied 
-and developed in the Southern Continent during the warm age 
-of the southern—and reached East Australia from that continent, 
then spread north through Tasmania into New Guinea and the 
Papuan Islands. Why they are not found in New Zealand is 
difficult to say; some temporary subsidence or other barrier may 
probably have prevented their reaching it. It does seem to me 
strange if the marsupials reached Australia vid the Java Sea, Timor, 
-and the belt of the Austro-Malayan Islands to the west of it, that 
with the exception of a cuscus, which may not improbably have 
‘been introduced, there are no marsupials in any of the South- 
Eastern Austro-Malayan Islands, where there are no enemies not 
found in New Guinea and Australia, especially in Timor, which 
is so Australian in its climate and vegetation. The ancestors of 
the present marsupials in South America, which have no near 
