rom the one are equally so from the
other, such as Pheasants, Grouse, Vultures, and Woodpeckers; while
Cockatoos, Broad-tailed Parrots, Podargi, and the great families of the
Honeysuckers and Brush-turkeys, with many others, comprising no less
than twenty-four genera of land-birds, are common to both countries, and
are entirely confined to them.

When we consider the wonderful dissimilarity of the two regions in all
those physical conditions which were once supposed to determine the
forms of life-Australia, with its open plains, stony deserts, dried up
rivers, and changeable temperate climate; New Guinea, with its luxuriant
forests, uniformly hot, moist, and evergreen--this great similarity in
their productions is almost astounding, and unmistakeably points to
a common origin. The resemblance is not nearly so strongly marked in
insects, the reason obviously being, that this class of animals are much
more immediately dependent on vegetation and climate than are the
more highly organized birds and Mammalia. Insects also have far more
effective means of distribution, and have spread widely into every
district favourable to their development and increase. The giant
Ornithopterae have thus spread from New Guinea over the whole
Archipelago, and as far as the base of the Himalayas; while the elegant
long-horned Anthribidae have spread in the opposite direction from
Malacca to New Guinea, but owing to unfavourable conditions have not
been able to establish themselves in Australia. That country, on the
other hand, has developed a variety of flower-haunting Chafers and
Buprestidae, and numbers of large and curious terrestrial Weevils,
scarcely any of which are adapted to the damp gloomy forests of New
Guinea, where entirely different forms are to be found. There are,
however, some groups of insects, constituting what appear to be the
remains of the ancient population of the equatorial parts of the
Australian region, which are still almost entirely confined to it. Such
are the interesting sub-family of Longicorn coleoptera--Tmesisternitae;
one of the best-marked genera of Buprestidae--Cyphogastra; and the
beautiful weevils forming the genus Eupholus. Among butterflies we have
the genera Mynes, Hypocista, and Elodina, and the curious eye-spotted
Drusilla, of which last a single species is found in Java, but in no
other of the western islands.

The facilities for the distribution of plants are still greater than
they are for insec