INTRODUCTION. 
When we first planned a treatise on the Birds of Celebes, we soon found 
that it would be quite impossible to restrict ourselves to the mainland, as this 
is everywhere surrounded by larger or smaller islands which are so connected 
with it by their Avifaunas that they could not be left out; at the same time it 
proved impossible to define a natural zoological frontier between certain of these 
islands and the adjacent ones. Our frontispiece-map shows the limits we decided 
upon, viz. the inclusion of the Talaut Islands in the north, the Sula Islands in 
the east, and the Djampea Group in the south, though at each of these points 
elements from, respectively, the Philippines, the Moluccas, and the Lesser Sunda 
Islands are very marked. The boundary so chosen adjoins to the north the 
southern limit of the Philippines, as defined by Tweeddale, Worcester and 
Bourns, and others; to the east it coincides with Salvadori’s western border, 
as drawn in his “Ornitologia della Papuasia e delle Molluche”; to the west 
it follows the eastern boundary of Borneo, as adopted in Everett’s “List of the 
Birds of the Bornean Group”, and by other writers; to the south it takes in 
all the islands between Celebes and the Lesser Sundas. The book may thus 
be said to fill up an ornithological gap, and the bounds as chosen appear also 
to be the most natural, except possibly (?) in the case of the Djampea Group. 
Moreover, the Avifauna of the adjacent groups often gives a clue to the deriv- 
ation of non-Celebesian forms in Celebes; it would, therefore, be inadvisable 
to leave them out. 
Meyer & Wiglesworth, Birds of Celetes (May 4th 1898), 
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