CHAP, XX.] 



CELEBES. 



431 



important and extensive groups of Asiatic birds. It is not 

 single species or even genera, but whole families that are thus 

 absent, and among them families which are pre-eminently 

 characteristic of all tropical Asia. Such are the Timaliidae, or 

 babblers, of which there are twelve genera in Borneo, and 

 nearly thirty genera in the Oriental Kegion, but of which one 

 species only, hardly distinguishable from a Malayan form, in- 

 habits Celebes ; the Phyllornithidee, or green bulbuls, and the 

 Pycnonotidse, or bulbuls, both absolutely ubiquitous in tropical 

 Asia and Malaya, but unknown in Celebes ; the Eurylsemidse, 

 or gapers, found everywhere in the great Malay Islands ; the 

 Megalsemidse, or barbets ; the Trogonidse, or trogons ; and the 

 Phasianidse, or pheasants, all pre-eminently Asiatic and Malayan 

 but all absent from Celebes, with the exception of the common 

 jungle-fowl, which, owing to the passion of Malays for cock- 

 fighting, may have been introduced. To these important 

 families may be added Asiatic and Malayan genera by the score ; 

 but, confining ourselves to these seven ubiquitous families, 

 we must ask, — is it possible, that, at the period when the 

 ancestors of the peculiar Celebes mammals entered the island, 

 and when the forms of life, though distinct, could not have been 

 quite unlike those now living, it could have actually formed a 

 part of the continent without possessing representatives of the 

 greater part of these extensive and important families of birds ? 

 To get rid altogether of such varied and dominant types of 

 bird-life by any subsequent process of submersion is more 

 difficult than to exterminate mammalia; and we are therefore 

 again driven to our former conclusion — that the present land of 

 Celebes has never (in Tertiary times) been united to the Asiatic 

 continent, but has received its population of Asiatic forms by 

 migration across narrow straits and intervening islands. Taking 

 into consideration the amount of affinity on the one hand, and 

 the isolation on the other, of the Celebesian fauna, we may 

 probably place the period of this earlier migration in the early 

 part of the latter half of the Tertiary period, that is, in middle 

 or late Miocene times. 



Celebes not strictly a Continental Island. — A study of the 

 mammalian and of the bird-fauna of Celebes thus leads us in 



