occurrence of several species or groups characteristic of
the Siamese countries or of India, but which do not occur in Borneo or
Sumatra. Among Mammals the Rhinoceros javanicus is the most striking
example, for a distinct species is found in Borneo and Sumatra, while
the Javanese species occurs in Burma and even in Bengal. Among birds,
the small ground-dove, Geopelia striata, and the curious bronze-coloured
magpie, Crypsirhina varians, are common to Java and Siam; while there
are in Java species of Pteruthius, Arrenga, Myiophonus, Zoothera,
Sturnopastor, and Estrelda, the near allies of which are found in
various parts of India, while nothing like them is known to inhabit
Borneo or Sumatra.

Such a curious phenomenon as this can only be understood by supposing
that, subsequent to the separation of Java, Borneo became almost
entirely submerged, and on its re-elevation was for a time connected
with the Malay peninsula and Sumatra, but not with Java or Siam. Any
geologist who knows how strata have been contorted and tilted up, and
how elevations and depressions must often have occurred alternately, not
once or twice only, but scores and even hundreds of times, will have no
difficulty in admitting that such changes as have been here indicated,
are not in themselves improbable. The existence of extensive coal-beds
in Borneo and Sumatra, of such recent origin that the leaves which
abound in their shales are scarcely distinguishable from those of the
forests which now cover the country, proves that such changes of level
actually did take place; and it is a matter of much interest, both to
the geologist and to the philosophic naturalist, to be able to form some
conception of the order of those changes, and to understand how they
may have resulted in the actual distribution of animal life in these
countries; a distribution which often presents phenomena so strange and
contradictory, that without taking such changes into consideration we
are unable even to imagine how they could have been brought about.

CHAPTER X. BALI AND LOMBOCK.

(JUNE, JULY, 1856.)

THE islands of Bali and Lombock, situated at the eastern end of Java,
are particularly interesting. They are the only islands of the whole
Archipelago in which the Hindu religion still maintains itself--and they
form the extreme points of the two great zoological divisions of the
Eastern hemisphere; for although so similar in external appearance
and in all physical featu