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 Timaliidse, or 
babblers, of which there are twelve genera in Borneo, and 
nearly thirty genera in the Oriental Region, but of which one 
species only, hardly distinguishable from a Malayan form, in- 
habits Celebes ; the Phyllornithidae, or green bulbuls, and the 
Pycnonotidae, or bulbuls, both absolutely ubiquitous in tropical 
Asia and Malaya, but unknown in Celebes ; the Eurylaemidse, 
or gapers, found everywhere in the great Malay Islands; the 
Megalaemidae, or barbets ; the Trogonidae, 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 
