)
enclosed by tracts under a thousand fathoms, which separate the basins from
each other and from the adjacent Pacific and Indian Oceans (see map). This
peculiar formation of the sea-bottom probably indicates that this area has
been the seat of great local upheavals and subsidences; and it is quite in
accordance with this view that we find the Moluccas, while closely agreeing
with New Guinea in their forms of life, yet strikingly deficient in many
important groups, and exhibiting an altogether poverty-stricken appearance
as regards the higher animals. It is a suggestive fact that the Philippine
Islands bear an exactly parallel relation to Borneo, being equally
deficient in many of the higher groups; and here too, in the Sooloo Sea, we
find a similar enclosed basin of great depth. Hence we may in both cases
connect, on the one hand, the extensive area of land-surface and of
adjacent shallow sea with a long period of stability and a consequent rich
development of the forms of life; and, on the other hand, a highly broken
land-surface with the adjacent seas of great but very unequal depths, with
a period of disturbance, probably involving extensive submersions of the
land, resulting in a scanty and fragmentary vertebrate fauna.

_Zoology of Celebes._--The zoology of Celebes differs so remarkably from
that of both the great divisions of the Archipelago above indicated, that
it is very difficult to decide in which to place it. It possesses only
about sixteen species of terrestrial mammalia, so that it is at once
distinguished from Borneo and Java by its extreme poverty in this class. Of
this small number four belong to the Moluccan and Australian fauna--there
being two marsupials of the genus Cuscus, and two forest rats said to be
allied to Australian types. {456}

The remaining twelve species are, generally speaking, of Malayan or Asiatic
types, but some of them are so peculiar that they have no near allies in
any part of the world; while the rest are of the ordinary Malay type or
even identical with Malayan species, and some of these may be recent
introductions through human agency. These twelve species of Asiatic type
will be now enumerated. They consist of five peculiar squirrels--a group
unknown farther east; a peculiar species of wild pig; a deer so closely
allied to the _Cervus hippelaphus_ of Borneo that it may well have been
introduced by man both here and in the Moluccas; a civet, _Viverra
tangalunga_, common in al