166 
Annnal Congress 
C Th* Emu 
Jan. 
Royal Australasian Ornithologists’ Union. 
23rd Annual Congress 
Address delivered to members of the Royal Australasian Ornith¬ 
ologists' Union at Rockhampton on 15th October, 1924, by 
His Excellency Sir Matthew Nathan, G.C.M.G., Governor 
of Queensland. 
For a newcomer in Australia a double meaning attaches to the 
rubric of “Here beginneth a new life,” for not only will his own 
future experiences differ from those he has had in the less clear 
atmosphere and less free conditions of other lands, but the life 
around him, and to wonder with a new and stimulating wonder- 
from that which he has known before. The trees, the shrubs, 
and the grasses are different, and more different still is the 
animal life that meets him even in the midst of an imported 
fauna. Owing to these importations full realisation of the 
difference does not come to him until he has got out into the 
country and has seen something of the bigger animals—marsu¬ 
pial mammals and struthious birds. The slowest thinker is 
forced then to wonder at the distance that obviously separates 
the life of the old countries from the older life that is now 
around him and to wonder with a new and stimulating wonder¬ 
ment how this distance has been created. Of course it has some 
correspondence with geographical distance, but that geographical 
distance is not the cause of the great structural differences in the 
fauna of various regions is evident from the fact that there are 
countries as far from the homelands as is Australia, which have 
no such peculiar forms of life as there are here. In his inquiry 
for a more complete explanation the newcomer is thrown back to 
the most distant times, times in themselves vastly far apart, when 
continents sank and broke up, and forms of life were marooned 
on its fragments. In some fragments the forms maintained 
characteristics that disappeared from those in others or in the 
continental masses with which there was earlier connection, and 
again in the various separated masses and fragments new forms 
and characteristics, sometimes by the side of and sometimes in 
the place of the old, have developed according to the special con¬ 
ditions of each. It is not only or mainly geographical continents 
and islands that have their own forms of life. There are bio¬ 
logical islands on the mainland and biological continents that 
include oceans. Deserts and snow-capped mountain ranges, 
desiccated or thrown up in prehistoric times, have isolated 
families, genera and species as much as have the deep seas then 
created, but the formation of deep seas and variations in the 
configuration of the oceans have, possibly more than any other 
results of earth movements, influenced the distribution of forms 
of life. The Nearctic, the Neotropical and the Australian regions 
are practically continental islands in the true sense; the Ethiopian 
and the Oriental regions are islands of which the insularity is 
