The very fact that Australia
incloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once
inhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond
question that uninterrupted land communication must once have existed
between Australia and those distant continents.
In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace's Line,
from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reaching
zoological importance, separates what is called by science 'the
Australian province' on the southwest from 'the Indo-Malayan province'
to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply
the plants and animals of the Australian type from those of the common
Indian and Burmese pattern. South of Wallace's Line we now find several
islands, big and small, including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the
Moluccas, Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whose
precise geographical position on the map must of course be readily
remembered, in this age of school boards and universal examination, by
every pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by minor
straits of much shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarine
bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same wide Australian
continent, because animals of the Australian type are still found in
every one of them. No Indian or Malayan animal, however, of the larger
sort (other than birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's
Line.
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