however, you come to islands which have a very
different flora and fauna, totally unlike that found in Asia, but very
similar to that found in Australia.

Australia, be it known, is totally different in all its animal and
vegetable phenomena from Asia.

In Australia, until the white man very recently carried them across,
there were no monkeys, apes, cats, bears, tigers, wolves, elephants,
horses, squirrels or rabbits. Instead there were found animals that are
found nowhere else, and which seem to belong to a different and
so-called extinct geologic age, such as the kangaroo, wombats, the
platypus--which the sailors used to tell us was neither bird not beast,
and yet was both. In birds, Australia has also very strange specimens,
such as the ostrich which can not fly, but can outrun a horse and kills
its prey by kicking forward like a man. Australia also has immense
mound-making turkeys, honeysuckers and cockatoos, but no woodpeckers,
quail or pheasants.

Wallace was the first to discover that there are various islands, some
of them several hundred miles from Australia, where the animal life is
identical with that of Australia. And then there are islands, only a
comparatively few miles away, which have all the varieties of birds and
beasts found in Asia.

But this line that once separated continents is in places but fifteen
miles wide, and is always marked by a deep-water channel, but the seas
that separate Borneo and Sumatra from Asia, although wide, are so
shallow that ships can find anchorage anywhere.

The Wallace Line, proving the subsidence of the sea and upheaval of the
land, has never been seriously disputed, and is to many students the one
great discovery by which Wallace will be remembered.

Wallace's book on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals" sets forth
in a most interesting manner, the details of how he came to discover the
Line.

It was in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five that Wallace, alone in the wilds
of the Malay Archipelago, became convinced of the scientific truth that
species were an evolution from a common source, and he began making
notes of his observations along this particular line of thought. Some
months afterward he wrote out his belief in the form of an essay, but
then he had no definite intention of what he would do with the paper,
beyond keeping it for future reference when he returned to England. In
the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven, however, he decided to send it
to Darw