130 A NATURALIST IN TASMANIA ch. 



in Australia are sufficient to indicate the im- 

 portance of knowing something of the fossil 

 history of animals for the interpretation of their 

 present geographical distribution, and to suggest 

 that in very early times a fauna with many 

 common elements was continuously spread over 

 the whole of the habitable globe. 



The region where Australia at the present 

 epoch comes into closest contact with the other 

 great land-masses of the world, is to the north 

 in the tropical East Indies, where an archi- 

 pelago of islands stretches continuously from New 

 Guinea and the north Australian coast to the 

 Malay Peninsula. In the middle of this region 

 a certain admixture of Oriental and Australian 

 forms takes place, but, as Dr. Wallace has shown, 

 the Malay Islands can be divided geographically 

 by a line passing between Bali and Lombok 

 to the south and through Celebes, which is a 

 sort of no man's land and apparently has been 

 isolated for a very long time, to the north. To 

 the east of this line the islands belong, from the 

 character of their living inhabitants, to Australia, 

 to the west the large islands of Borneo, Java, 

 and Sumatra, with a number of smaller islands 

 belong to the Malay Peninsula and the Oriental 

 Region. Thus in Borneo and Sumatra there are 

 no Marsupials, but a host of Placental Mammals, 

 including monkeys and the Orang-Utan, and the 

 birds belong to the typical Oriental groups, such 

 as Woodpeckers and Pheasants ; the Australian 



