CHAP. Ill 



ZOOLOGICAL REGIONS 



47 



are so great that every naturalist agrees that Austraha 

 must be made a separate region, the only difference of 

 opinion being as to its extent, some thinking that New 

 Zealand should form another separate region ; but this 

 question need not now delay us. 



In birds Australia is by no means so isolated from the 

 rest of the world, as it contains great numbers of warblers, 

 thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, crows, and other familiar 

 types of the Eastern Hemisphere; yet a considerable 

 number of the most characteristic Oriental families are 

 absent. Thus there are no vultures, woodpeckers, pheas- 

 ants, bulbuls, or barbets in the Australian region ; and the 

 absence of these is almost as marked a feature as that of 

 cats, deer, or monkeys, among mammalia. The most 

 conspicuous and characteristic birds of the Australian 

 region are, the piping crows; the honey-suckers (Meli- 

 phagidae), a family quite peculiar to the region ; the lyre- 

 birds ; the great terrestrial kingfishers (Dacelo) ; the great 

 goat-suckers called more-porks in Australia and forming 

 the genus Podargus ; the wonderful abundance of parrots, 

 including such remarkable forms as the white and black 

 cockatoos, and the gorgeously coloured brush-tongued 

 lories ; the almost equal abundance of fine pigeons more 

 gaily coloured than any others on the globe ; the strange 

 brush-turkeys and mound-builders, the only birds that 



probable that it may be as great as in Europe, My friend A. C. Swinton, 

 Esq., while working in the then almost unknown gold-field of Maryborough, 

 Victoria, in January, 1855, found a fragment of a well-formed stone axe 

 resting on the metamorphic schistose bed-rock about five feet beneath the 

 surface. It was overlain by the compact gravel drift called by the miners 

 " cement," and by an included layer of hard iron-stained sandstone. The 

 fragment is about an inch and three-eighths wide and the same length, and 

 is of very hard fine-grained black basalt. One side is ground to a very 

 smooth and regular surface, terminating in a well-formed cutting edge more 

 than an inch long, the return face of the cutting part being about a quarter 

 of an inch wide. The other side is a broken surface. The weapon appears 

 to have been an axe or tomahawk closely resembling that figured at p. 335 

 of Lumholtz's Among Cannibals, from Central Queensland. The fragment 

 was discovered by Mr. Smnton and the late Mr. Mackvvorth Shore, one of 

 the discoverers of the gold-field, before any rush to it had taken place, and 

 it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that it was formed prior to the 

 deposit of the gravel drift and iron-stained sandstone under which it lay. 

 This would indicate a great antiquity of man in Australia, and would enable 

 us to account for the fossilised remains of the dingo in Pleistocene deposits 

 as those of an animal introduced by man. 



