GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 7 
in correlation with this Antarctic continental hypothesis. The little group of the 
Jacanas, greatly resembling and allied to the Rails, but with longer legs and toes of 
such remarkable length and tenuity that the birds run with ease and great celerity 
over the surface of the leaves of the water lilies and other aquatic plants, is one of 
these. The typical genus Parra includes some dozen species which are inhabitants 
of tropical Australia, Africa, and South America. Their power of flight is essentially 
feeble, and they could not possibly have arrived at their present widely separated 
areas of distribution, but for some previous land connection between their respective 
habitats. A bird of a very different character, but possessing a similar notable 
distribution, is the gigantic Crane or Jabiru, Mycteria australis. Like the Jacana it 
is a denizen of tropical or sub-tropical Australia, Africa, and South America. As 
was pointed out many years since by the late Professor Huxley, the essentially 
south-continental parrot tribe possesses some nearly related family groups in both 
Australasia and South America. ~~ 
There are certain other birds indigenous to Australia which, with reference 
to their distribution further afield, yield, in a less degree, similarly suggestive 
evidence. The little wood swallows, referable to the genus Artamus, belong to this 
category. In addition to being found in Australia, where they are most abundantly 
represented, various species occur in India and in the essentially African region of 
Madagascar. A. genus of true swallows, Atticora, also common in Australia, is yet 
more significantly distributed, for it has, as with species previously cited, both the 
South American and African continents recorded among its habitats. 
The fauna of Australia is of peculiar interest, viewed altogether apart from 
those phenomena which appear to justify our regarding that territory as the isolated 
residuum of a disrupted Antarctic Continent. As an indirect but collateral outcome 
of that interpretation, it is found that Australia can lay claim to the possession within 
its boundaries of a fauna that yields the palm to no other one on the earth’s surface 
in the matter of aristocratic and ancient lineage. 
The aboriginal population ‘of Australia, such of it as still survives, is of itself 
a standing monument of the high antiquity of that country’s fauna. As is conceded 
by the common consent of experts in ethnology, the Australian aboriginal represents 
the most primitive type of humanity. He is, in fact, a surviving relic of the Stone 
Age, who, in this huge isolated island, has, in company with the marsupial mammals, 
preserved his primeval simplicity down to the present date. Like all such less 
civilised, or less effectively equipped, races, he is fast disappearing before the 
