128 AUSTRALIAN ANCEST;> V of T he CROWNED PIGEON OF 



birds would bear to thefacttha't portions of this posttertiary fauna were 

 by inimical life conditions dri ven to or imprisoned in the north as 

 well as in the south and southeast of its extreme limits. What 

 association more significant of this could we Lave than that of the 

 Crowned Pigeons of ^ T ew Guinea, the marsupial carnivores of 

 Tasmania, and the Moas of N /ew Zealand mingling with each other 

 on the banks of the Condamn le . Each of these groups has been 

 disassociated from the others an( j f rom the parent fauna by literal 

 insulation, a fact charging our colleagues in research with the 

 solution of a difficult but to<ist interesting problem, For ourselves 

 we may naturally suspect th^t the Gouras are not the only New 

 Guinea type which had forbears beyond the present tropic of 

 Caj ricoru, and if on the one h nm \ we m&y l 00 t forward with confi- 

 dence to the discovery of otjj ier l lvmg representatives of archaic 

 forms as the interior and highl an j s () f that country are explored, re- 

 ciprocally, we may almost prU m i se that palceontology will reveal 

 other roots of Papuan life benu a tli our Australian surface. With 

 such extrinsic claims upon oui no tice the fossils under view will in 

 the course of examination prov e to have structural relations con- 

 ducive to further interest. 



They consist of four porti, ons f metatarsals, two proximal of 

 the left side, and two distal of t1, e right ; of the latter the larger com- 

 prises about half of the bone hL wail t 8 the trochlea for the fourth 

 toe. This is fortunately supplied by the companion example which 

 consists only of the distal expansion. 



Leading characters— the; mesial trochlea extends well distal 

 of the others, excluding the pLchers, raptorial birds and (in con- 

 junction with general form and proportions of the shaft) the parrots ; 

 the scar for the articulation of the first metatarsal is conspicuous 

 excluding the cursorial and str[ u thj ori . s j,; r j s . | t j s also high upon 

 the metatarse, excluding agairl the perching and grasping birds ; 

 the shaft is non-elongate, b roa d aru j compressed, excluding the 

 waders ; the lateral trochleas a. re on the same level of descent, ex- 

 cluding the swimmers and less! absolutely the poultry. From these 

 latter we are in brief led by tin, exhaustive process to the pigeons 

 and among them wo find in the essential reactions for which 



we have been testing. J 



J 



