lso in New Guinea and Waigiou.

In place of the excessive poverty of mammals which characterises the
Moluccas, we have a very rich display of the feathered tribes. The
number of species of birds at present known from the various islands of
the Molluccan group is 265, but of these only 70 belong to the usually
abundant tribes of the waders and swimmers, indicating that these are
very imperfectly known. As they are also pre-eminently wanderers, and
are thus little fitted for illustrating the geographical distribution of
life in a limited area, we will here leave them out of consideration and
confine our attention only to the 195 land birds.

When we consider that all Europe, with its varied climate and
vegetation, with every mile of its surface explored, and with the
immense extent of temperate Asia and Africa, which serve as storehouses,
from which it is continually recruited, only supports 251 species of
land birds as residents or regular immigrants, we must look upon the
numbers already procured in the small and comparatively unknown islands
of the Moluccas as indicating a fauna of fully average richness in this
department. But when we come to examine the family groups which go to
make up this number, we find the most curious deficiencies in some,
balanced by equally striking redundancy in other. Thus if we compare
the birds of the Moluccas with those of India, as given in Mr. Jerdon's
work, we find that the three groups of the parrots, kingfishers, and
pigeons, form nearly _one-third_ of the whole land-birds in the former,
while they amount to only _one-twentieth_ in the latter country. On
the other hand, such wide-spread groups as the thrushes, warblers, and
finches, which in India form nearly _one-third_ of all the land-birds,
dwindle down in the Moluccas to _one-fourteenth._

The reason of these peculiarities appears to be, that the Moluccan
fauna has been almost entirely derived from that of New Guinea, in which
country the same deficiency and the same luxuriance is to be observed.
Out of the seventy-eight genera in which the Moluccan land-birds may be
classed, no less than seventy are characteristic of Yew Guinea, while
only six belong specially to the Indo-Malay islands. But this close
resemblance to New Guinea genera does not extend to the species, for
no less than 140 out of the 195 land-birds are peculiar to the Moluccan
islands, while 32 are found also in New Guinea, and 15 in the Indo-Malay
islands. These