Footnotes:
[18] "Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt."
[19] Whenever I think of Bob and the ducks I remember that line of Virgil, in which he tells of Juno's hatred of the Trojans—"Æternum servans sub pectore vulnus."
CHAPTER XI.
ANIMAL AND PLANT LIFE.
Mr. Wallace and the Malay Archipelago—Animals— Birds—General characteristics of plants—European flora in mountains—Darwin's explanation—Fruits— History of cinchona introduction—Mr. Ledger's story—Indiarubber.
No less than eight years (1854—1862) were employed by Mr. Wallace, the naturalist, in "the study of man and nature" in the Malay Archipelago. During this period he collected a vast number of specimens of animals and plants, and, some years after his return to England, gave the results of his travels to the world in his "Malay Archipelago." The general conclusions which Mr. Wallace was led to form are of such interest, that I shall endeavour very briefly to lay them before the reader.
In the first place, the evidence supplied by the nature of the distribution of the various plants and animals is such as to point to the belief that the whole Archipelago is composed of fragments of two separate continents. The Malay islands must, therefore, be divided into two groups. Of these groups the first, roughly consisting of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines, once formed part of the continent of Asia; while in the second, the Celebes, Flores, Timor, the Moluccas, and New Guinea, we have fragments of a great Pacific continent, which has been gradually and irregularly broken up. The inhabitants of the former region, to which Mr. Wallace gives the name Indo-Malayan, are Malays; those of the latter, the Austro-Malayan, are Papuans.
Secondly, the intervening seas, which surround the various islands which have now taken the place of these former continental tracts, have been formed by the subsidence of land from which the foundations have been withdrawn by the continued activity of a long volcanic chain which traverses the Archipelago from end to end. And therefore, strange as it may seem at first sight, the fertile island of Java, with its rich plains and abundant vegetation—so unlike the traditional barrenness of a volcanic region—is the work of this subterranean energy.