e one because it is almost impossible to place it in any
of the six zoological regions, or determine whether it has ever been
actually joined to a continent--the other because it {542} combines the
characteristics of continental and oceanic islands.

The peculiarities of the Celebesian fauna have already been dwelt upon in
several previous works, but they are so remarkable and so unique that they
cannot be omitted in a treatise on "Insular Faunas"; and here, as in the
case of Borneo and Java, fuller consideration and the application of the
general principles laid down in our First Part, lead to a solution of the
problem at once more simple and more satisfactory than any which have been
previously proposed. I now look upon Celebes as an outlying portion of the
great Asiatic continent of Miocene times, which either by submergence or
some other cause had lost the greater portion of its animal inhabitants,
and since then has remained more or less completely isolated from every
other land. It has thus preserved a fragment of a very ancient fauna along
with a number of later types which have reached it from surrounding islands
by the ordinary means of dispersal. This sufficiently explains all the
peculiar _affinities_ of its animals, though the peculiar and distinctive
_characters_ of some of them remain as mysterious as ever.

New Zealand is shown to be so completely continental in its geological
structure, and its numerous wingless birds so clearly imply a former
connection with some other land (as do its numerous lizards and its
remarkable reptile, the Hatteria), that the total absence of indigenous
land-mammalia was hardly to be expected. Some attention is therefore given
to the curious animal which has been seen but never captured, and this is
shown to be probably identical with an animal referred to by Captain Cook.
The more accurate knowledge which has recently been obtained of the sea
bottom around New Zealand enables us to determine that the former
connection of that island with Australia was towards the north, and this is
found to agree well with many of the peculiarities of its fauna.

The flora of New Zealand and that of Australia are now both so well known,
and they present so many peculiarities, and relations of so anomalous a
character, {543} as to present in Sir Joseph Hooker's opinion an almost
insoluble problem. Much additional information on the physical and
geological history of these two countries has, ho