GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY. 37 
Curlew, and many others, abide upon the banks or disport in the open water, while 
an advance guard of screaming Cockatoos, Ibises, Hawks, and other of the wilder 
species, herald the approach of the intruding steamboat to their feathered kinsfolk 
higher up or lower down the stream. 
So considerable a space has been devoted to certain more notable Australian 
birds, such as the quaint More-porks, Piping Crows or Colonial Magpies, Giant King- 
fishers, and other less prominent types, in a succeeding chapter, as to obviate 
the necessity of further comment on them here. ‘This observation will apply also 
to the fish tribe, which has already received a share of notice with reference to the 
several peculiar Australian types that, by virtue of the geographical distribution of 
their nearest allies, point towards the pre-existence of a large central Antarctic 
Continent whence many of the inhabitants of the more widely separated regions 
of Australia, Africa and South America would appear to have primarily migrated. 
The flora or plant life of Australia is as strikingly distinct in-its character as 
the animal races. The vast forests of Eucalypti, embracing some 150 known species, 
which form so characteristic a feature of the greater portion of the tree-producing 
areas of Australia, represent in themselves a most ancient lineage, non-existent at 
the present day outside the Australasian region, but whose members, as fossil deposits 
teach us, formerly constituted a dominent feature in European forestry. The Bankseas, 
Hakeas, and numerous other of the essentially Australian Proteacee, tell the same 
tale, and further evidence in a similar direction might be adduced from the characteristic 
Grass-trees, or “ Blackboys,” Xanthorracee and Cycadacee. The Heath tribe, Epacride, 
spice-perfumed Boronias and numerous other Diosmez, which clothe the more open 
moorlands of Temperate Australia, are also to a preponderating extent unique. In 
the tropics again the very characteristic Baobab or Bottle-tree, Adansonia rupestris, 
peculiar to the northern territory of Western Australia, is of special interest with 
relation to the fact that, in common with certain animal types previously referred to, 
its nearest ally, Adansonia digitata, is indigenous to tropical Africa. A characteristic 
representation of the Australian Baobab in full foliage is given in Plate V., while a 
fuller reference to and additional illustrations of both this and other types of 
Australian vegetation are relegated to a succeeding Chapter. 
Material evidence yielded by the vegetable kingdom in support of the notogeal 
continental interpretation is contained in Mr. H. O. Forbes’ Paper on the Chatham 
Islands previously quoted. Taking plant groups that are confined, or nearly so, to 
the Southern Hemisphere, Mr. Forbes remarks :—‘“ Among the Saxifragez, a genus 
