426 
ISLAND LIFE. 
[part II. 
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, yet strikingly deficient in 
many important groups, and exhibiting an altogether poverty- 
striken appearance as regards the higher animals. It is a 
suggestive fact that the Philippine Islands bear an exactly 
parallel relation to Borneo, being equally deficient in many of 
the higher groups ; 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 
consequent 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 submersions of the land, resulting 
in a scanty and fragmentary vertebrate fauna. 
Zoology of Celebes . — The zoology of Celebes differs so remark- 
ably 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 possesses only about sixteen species of terrestrial 
mammalia, so that it is at once distinguished from Borneo and 
Java by its extreme poverty in this class. Of this small number 
four belong to the Moluccan and Australian fauna — there being 
two marsupials of the genus Cuscus, and two forest rats said 
to be allied to Australian types. 
The remaining twelve species are, generally speaking, of 
Malayan or Asiatic types, but some of them are so peculiar 
that they have no near allies in any part of the world ; while 
the rest are of the ordinary Malay type or even identical with 
Malayan species, and some of these may be recent introductions 
through human agency. These twelve species of Asiatic type 
will be now enumerated. They consist of five peculiar squirrels 
— a group unknown farther east ; a peculiar species of wild 
pig; a deer so closely allied to the Cervus hippelaphus of 
Borneo that it may well have been introduced by man bot 
