466 
ISLAND LIFE, 
[rART IT. 
comparatively narrow island, stretching from far south of 
Tasmania to New Guinea; while the crystalline and Secondary 
formations of central North Australia probably indicate the 
existence of one or more large islands in that direction. 
The eastern and the western islands — with which we are 
now chiefly concerned — would then differ considerably in their 
The white portions represent land ; the shaded parts sea. 
The existing land of Australia is shown in outline. 
vegetation and animal life. The western and more ancient land 
already possessed, in its main features, the peculiar Australian 
flora, and also the ancestral forms of its strange marsupial 
fauna, both of which it had probably received at some earlier 
epoch by a temporary union wflth the Asiatic continent over 
what is now the Java sea. Eastern Australia, on the other hand, 
