THE HUMAN SPECIES. 115 



proper; foi: the strait which severs it from New Guinea is 

 almost fordable in many parts, the ship channels being narrow 

 and dangerous passes. The whole of the islands in question, 

 from New Guinea to beyond the Solomon's group, bear a still 

 greater appearance of cataclysis, not by division so much as by 

 submersion. Beside the singular zoology already noticed, the 

 ec]uatorial islands are the habitation of Simiada, such as the 

 Gibbons, (Hylohates,) or long-armed apes, and of two or three 

 species of Pithecus, or Orang Outan, in stature as large as 

 men, and in strength superior to eight or more, — of all the 

 brute creation the genus which structurally approximates most 

 to man, who, to the eastward and in Australia, is himself 

 represented by Papua tribes, cannibals so low in the scale of 

 numanity, that, were it not for the admixture of other blood, 

 hopes of ameliorating their condition would appear illusory. 

 They might be considered to form the centre of that antique 

 population which alone occupied the southern hemisphere, 

 before the diffusion of the bearded or Caucasian man; a popu- 

 lation primevally formed to breathe and multiply in the heated 

 and moist atmosphere of tropical swamps and forests, at a 

 period when the great Saurians and the now extinct Pachy- 

 derms existed ; and that their native region, extending far east- 

 ward in the Pacific, had in great part subsided, leaving the 

 islands and their organic creation, the evident wreck of a 

 former system of existence. 



EAST COAST OF ASIA. 



It is off the east coast of this part of Asia that the main 

 ramification of galleries passes from Japan to the north, as far 

 as Kamtschatka, and to the south by several trunks, beneath 

 the Bonin, Sulphur, Marian, and Ladrone groups; and again, 

 by the Philippines, Banda, &c, become connected with the 

 great equatorial centre of ignition in Java and the surrounding 

 craters. Although Chinese history commences with their 



