THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 3 
appreciated by the general reader:— that its direction, as a whole, 
ie that which a continuation of south-eastern Asia, under the 
same plutonic action which produced it, would possess;—the 
mountain ranges, which form the latter, sink into if irregularly 
in the lines of their longitudinal axes;—in one zone, that of 
the Peninsula, the connection is an actual geographical one;— 
the Peninsula is obviously continued in the dense clusters of 
islands and rocks, stretching on the parallel of its elevation and 
of the strike of its sedimentary rocks, from Singapore to Banka, 
and almost touches Sumatra, the mountain ranges of which are, 
notwithstanding, parallel to it;—Borneo and Celebes appear to 
represent the broader or eastern branch of the Indo-Chinese 
Peninsula, from which they are separated by the area of the 
China Sea, supposed to be sinking;—and, finally, nearly the 
whole Archipelago is surrounded by a great volcanic curve 
rooted in Asia itself, and the continuity of which demonstrates 
that the platform and the continental projection with which it is 
geographically connected are really united, at this day, into one 
geological region by a still vigorous power of plutonic expan¬ 
siveness, no longer, to appearance, forming hypogene elevations, 
but expending itself chiefly in the numerous volcanic vents 
along the borders where it sinks into the depths of the ocean. 
Whether the present platform ever rose above the level of 
the sea, and surrounded the now insular eminences with vast 
undulating plains of vegetation instead of a level expanse of 
water, we shall not hear seek to decide, although we think that 
Rallies and others who have followed in his steps too hastily 
connected the supposed subsidence with the existing geological 
configuration of the region, and neglected the all important evi¬ 
dence of the comparative distribution of the living flora and 
fauna, which seems to prove that the ancient southern continent, 
if such there was, had subsided before they came into existence. 
No conclusive reasons have yet been adduced why we should 
consider the islands of the Archipelago as the summits of a 
partially submerged, instead of a partially emerged, continent. 
But whether it was the sinking of the continent that deluged 
all the southern lowlands of Asia, leaving only the mountain 
summits visible, or its elevation that was arrested by the ex- 
