e of the Australian region is the almost total absence of
all the forms of terrestrial mammalia which abound in the rest of the
world, their place being supplied by a great variety of Marsupials. In
Australia and New Guinea there are no Insectivora, Carnivora, nor Ungulata,
while even the rodents are only represented by a few small rats and mice.
In the remoter Pacific Islands mammals are altogether absent (except
perhaps in New Zealand), but in the Moluccas and other islands bordering on
the Oriental region the higher mammals are represented by a few deer,
civets, and pigs, though it is doubtful whether the two former may not have
been introduced by man, as was almost certainly the case with the
semi-domesticated dingo of Australia.[8] These peculiarities in the
mammalia {47} are so great that every naturalist agrees that Australia must
be made a separate region, the only difference of opinion being as to its
extent, some thinking that New Zealand should form another separate region;
but this question need not now delay us.

In birds Australia is by no means so isolated from the rest of the world,
as it contains great numbers of warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes,
crows, and other familiar types of the Eastern Hemisphere; yet a
considerable number of the most characteristic Oriental families are
absent. Thus there are no vultures, woodpeckers, pheasants, bulbuls, or
barbets in the Australian region; and the absence of these is almost as
marked a feature as that of cats, deer, or monkeys, among mammalia. The
most conspicuous and characteristic birds of the Australian region are, the
piping crows; the honey-suckers (Meliphagidae), a family quite peculiar to
the region; the lyre-birds; the great terrestrial kingfishers (Dacelo); the
great goat-suckers called more-porks in Australia and forming the genus
Podargus; the wonderful abundance of parrots, including such remarkable
forms as the white and black cockatoos, and the gorgeously coloured
brush-tongued lories; the almost equal abundance of fine pigeons more gaily
coloured than any others on the globe; the strange brush-turkeys and
mound-builders, the only birds that {48} never sit upon their eggs, but
allow them to be hatched, reptile-like, by the heat of the sand or of
fermenting vegetable matter; and lastly, the emus and cassowaries, in which
the wings are far more rudimentary than in the ostriches of Africa and
South America. New Guinea and the surrounding island