Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
There is one peculiarity in the productions of Java that is very puzzling—the occurrence
of several species or groups characteristic of the Siamese countries or of India, but which do
not occur in Borneo or Sumatra. Among mammals the Rhinoceros javanicus is the most
striking example, for a
distinct
species is found in Borneo and Sumatra, while the Javanese
species occurs in Birmah and even in Bengal. Among birds, the small ground dove,
Geopelia striata, and the curious bronze-coloured magpie, Crypsirhina varians, are common
to Java and Siam; while there are in Java species of Pteruthius, Arrenga, Myiophonus,
Zoothera, Sturnopastor, and Estrelda, the nearest allies of which are found in various parts
of India, while nothing like them is known to inhabit Borneo or Sumatra.
Such a curious phenomenon as this can only be understood, by supposing that, subse-
quent to the separation of Java, Borneo became almost entirely submerged, and on its re-el-
evation was for a time connected with the Malay peninsula and Sumatra, but not with Java
or Siam. Any geologist who knows how strata have been contorted and tilted up, and how
elevations and depressions must often have occurred alternately, not once or twice only, but
scores and even hundreds of times, will have no difficulty in admitting that such changes as
have been here indicated are not in themselves improbable. The existence of extensive coal-
beds in Borneo and Sumatra, of such recent origin that the leaves which abound in their
shales are scarcely distinguishable from those of the forests which now cover the country,
proves that such changes of level actually did take place; and it is a matter of much interest,
both to the geologist and to the philosophic naturalist, to be able to form some conception of
the order of those changes, and to understand how they may have resulted in the actual dis-
tribution of animal life in these countries;—a distribution which often presents phenomena
so strange and contradictory, that without taking such changes into consideration we are un-
able even to imagine how they could have been brought about.
