CHAP. XX 



CELEBES 



455 



stretches out from the Siamese and Malayan peninsulas 

 as far as Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and the Philippines. To 

 the east another bank unites New Guinea and the Papuan 

 Islands as far as Aru, Mysol,and Waigiou, with Australia; 

 while the Moluccas and Timor groups are surrounded by 

 much deeper water, which forms, in the Banda and 

 Celebes Seas and perhaps in other parts of this area, great 

 basins of enormous depth (2,000 to 3,000 fathoms, or even 

 more) enclosed by tracts under a thousand fathoms, which 

 separate the basins from each other and from the adjacent 

 Pacific and Indian oceans (see map). This peculiar 

 formation of the sea-bottom probably indicates that this 

 area has been the seat of great local upheavals and 

 subsidences ; and it is quite in accordance with this view 

 that we find the Moluccas, while closely agreeing with 

 New Guinea in their forms of life, to be strikingly deficient 

 in many important groups, and exhibiting an altogether 

 poverty-stricken appearance as regards the higher animals. 

 It is a suggestive fact that the Philippine Islands bear a 

 somewhat parallel relation to Borneo, being equally defi- 

 cient in many of the higher mammals ; and here too, in 

 the Sooloo Sea, we find a similar enclosed basin of great 

 depth. Hence we may in both cases connect, on the one 

 hand, the extensive area of land-surface and of adjacent 

 shallow sea with a long period of stability and a con- 

 sequent rich development of the forms of life ; and, on 

 the other hand, a highly broken land-surface with the 

 adjacent seas of great but very unequal depths, with a 

 period of disturbance, probably involving extensive sub- 

 mersions of the land, resulting in a more or less frag- 

 mentary vertebrate fauna. 



Zoology of Celebes. — The zoology of Celebes differs so 

 remarkably from that of both the great divisions of the 

 Archipelago above indicated, that it is very difficult to 

 decide in which to place it. It is now known to possess forty- 

 four species of terrestrial mammalia, besides thirty-nine 

 bats, so that it is at once distinguished from Borneo and 

 Java by its extreme poverty in this class. The following 

 list has been kindly furnished me by Dr. A. B. Meyer, 



