46 
ISLAND LIFE. 
[fart I. 
Insectivora, Carnivora, nor Ungulata,, while even the rodents are 
only represented by a few small rats and mice. In the Pacific 
Islands mammals are altogether absent (except perhaps in New 
Zealand), but in the Moluccas and other islands bordering on the 
Oriental region the higher mammals are represented by a few 
deer, civets, and pigs, though it is doubtful whether the two 
former may not have been introduced by man, as was almost 
certainly the case with the semi-domesticated dingo of Australia. 
These peculiarities in the mammalia are so great that every 
naturalist agrees that Australia must be made a separate region, 
the only difference of opinion being as to its extent, some think- 
ing 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 character- 
istic Oriental families are absent. Thus there are no vultures, 
woodpeckers, pheasants, 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 (Meliphagidse), 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 the 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 never sit 
upon their eggs, but allow them to be hatched, reptile-like, by 
the heat of the sand or of fermenting vegetable matter; and 
lastly, the emus and cassowaries, in which the wings are far 
more rudimentary than in the ostriches of Africa and South 
America. New Guinea and the surrounding islands are remark- 
able for their tree-kangaroos, their birds-of-paradise, their raquet- 
tailed kingfishers, their great crown-pigeons, their crimson lories, 
