Beginning on the west there is Malaysia, a term which comprises all the islands of the Malay Archipelago up to the vicinity of New Guinea. New Guinea and the islands and archipelagoes near it constitute the region of Papuasia; south of Papuasia is Australia (including Tasmania, Lord Howe, and Norfolk Islands, and perhaps New Caledonia); to the south-east of Australia lies New Zealand, which dominion comprises naturally and politically the Kermadec islets, the Chatham Islands and Macquarie Island; Melanesia is the domain of the dark-skinned people who are half-Papuan and half-Polynesian, and is generally held to include the Solomon Islands, the Santa Cruz, and New Hebrides archipelagoes, and the Fiji group. All the foregoing (together with the Samoa and Tonga Islands) were once connected by land with each other and with the continent of Asia.
North of Papuasia is the division of small islands known as Micronesia; it includes the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline, and Ladrone archipelagoes. Almost in the middle of the northern half of the Pacific is the isolated ridge or shelf from which rises the Hawaii or Sandwich Islands, two of which are rather large (for Pacific islands). The Hawaii group is quite distinct from any other, and has never been joined to a continent. Finally, there remains the division of Polynesia, which likewise, in all probability, has never been continental, and which includes the separate archipelagoes of Marquezas, Tuamotu, Tubuai, Tahiti (the Society Islands), the Palmyra, Phœnix, and Malden groups, and the remote Easter Island, only 2374 miles from South America. The term "Polynesia" often covers the Samoa and the Tonga Islands, because they are peopled by the Polynesian race; but these groups are in other respects part of Melanesia. Finally, Oceania is a convenient term for all the islands, including New Guinea and New Zealand, which lie to the east of Malaysia, to the north and east of Australia.
[3] A tree in appearance like a conifer, but in reality belonging to an isolated and very peculiar sub-class of flowering plants, distantly akin to oaks and catkin-bearing trees.
[4] The real opossums are only found in America. Phalangers are woolly haired lemur-like marsupials, living in trees, which have their thumb and big toe opposite the other digits for grasping, besides a tail with a prehensile tip. In the arrangement of their teeth they are distantly related to kangaroos, which are really only phalangers, whose far-back ancestors have taken to a life on the ground.
[5] A specimen 33 feet long has been recorded.
[6] The New Guinea mountains are the highest in Australasia, higher than any land between the Himalayas and the Andes. They rise to over 16,000 feet in the west of New Guinea, and nearly 14,000 feet in the east. High mountains are common features on the great Malay islands. They rise to over 10,000 feet in Celebes and the Philippines, to 13,700 feet in North Borneo, and to altitudes of over 11,000 feet in Java and nearly as high in Timor.
[7] See p. 241.
[8] And since the discovery of Australasia began, a sustenance for shipwrecked mariners
[9] The Dugong, very commonly met with in the early stories of Australasian adventure, is an aquatic mammal, the size of a large porpoise, which belongs to the order of the Sirenians. It frequents the shores of estuaries and seacoasts with plenty of seaweed. It is a vegetable feeder only. See p. 165.
[10] Dr. W.E. Roth, writing to the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1908, describes the existing canoes on the northern and eastern coasts of Australia as being of two kinds: that which was made from a single sheet of bark, folded in its length and tied at the extremities (the sides being kept apart by primitive stretchers), and that which was hollowed by fire and stone axe from the trunk of a tree. But he implies by his further remarks that these "dug-out" canoes were originally obtained by the black Australians from the Melanesian or Negroid people of Papuasia, who are several degrees higher in mental development than the Australoids. He also alludes to rafts possessed by the northern and eastern Australians (the Tasmanians had somewhat similar ones), made of logs of white mangrove tied together at both ends, but in such a way that the rafts were narrower at one end than at the other. On top was placed some seaweed to form a cushion to sit on. These are propelled either like punts by means of a long pole, or are paddled with flattened stumps of mangrove or similar trees from the water side. In the tropical regions natives will make a rough-and-ready raft out of three trunks of the wild banana tied together with rattans or flexible canes.