e-eminently Asiatic and Malayan but all absent from
Celebes, with the exception of the common jungle-fowl, which, owing to the
passion of Malays for cock-fighting, may have been introduced. To these
important _families_ may be added Asiatic and Malayan _genera_ by the
score; but, confining ourselves to these seven ubiquitous families, we must
ask,--Is it possible, that, at the period when the ancestors of the
peculiar Celebes mammals entered the island, and when the forms of life,
though distinct, could not have been quite unlike those now living, it
could have actually formed a part of the continent without {461} possessing
representatives of the greater part of these extensive and important
families of birds? To get rid altogether of such varied and dominant types
of bird-life by any subsequent process of submersion is more difficult than
to exterminate mammalia; and we are therefore again driven to our former
conclusion--that the present land of Celebes has never (in Tertiary times)
been united to the Asiatic continent, but has received its population of
Asiatic forms by migration across narrow straits and intervening islands.
Taking into consideration the amount of affinity on the one hand, and the
isolation on the other, of the Celebesian fauna, we may probably place the
period of this earlier migration in the early part of the latter half of
the Tertiary period, that is, in middle or late Miocene times.

_Celebes not Strictly a Continental Island._--A study of the mammalian and
of the bird-fauna of Celebes thus leads us in both cases to the same
conclusion, and forbids us to rank it as a strictly continental island on
the Asiatic side. But facts of a very similar character are equally opposed
to the idea of a former land-connection with Australia or New Guinea, or
even with the Moluccas. The numerous marsupials of those countries are all
wanting in Celebes, except the phalangers of the genus Cuscus, and these
arboreal creatures are very liable to be carried across narrow seas on
trees uprooted by earthquakes or floods. The terrestrial cassowaries are
equally absent; and thus we can account for the presence of all the
Moluccan or Australian types actually found in Celebes without supposing
any land-connection on this side during the Tertiary period. The presence
of the Celebes ape in the island of Batchian, and of the babirusa in Bouru,
can be sufficiently explained by a somewhat closer approximation of the
respectiv