Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tinent from whence the ancestors of these creatures, and of many other intermediate forms,
could have been derived.
In this short sketch of the most striking peculiarities of the Natural History of Celebes, I
have been obliged to enter much into details that I fear will have been uninteresting to the
general reader, but unless I had done so my exposition would have lost much of its force and
value. It is by these details alone, that I have been able to prove the unusual features that
Celebes presents to us. Situated in the very midst of an Archipelago, and closely hemmed in
on every side by islands teeming with varied forms of life, its productions have yet a sur-
prising amount of individuality. While it is poor in the actual number of its species, it is yet
wonderfully rich in peculiar forms; many of which are singular or beautiful, and are in some
cases absolutely unique upon the globe. We behold here the curious phenomenon, of groups
of insects changing their outline in a similar manner when compared with those of surround-
ing islands, suggesting some common cause which never seems to have acted elsewhere in
exactly the same way. Celebes, therefore, presents us with a most striking example of the in-
terest that attaches to the study of the geographical distribution of animals. We can see that
their present distribution upon the globe is the result of all the more recent changes the
earth's surface has undergone; and by a careful study of the phenomena we are sometimes
able to deduce approximately what those past changes must have been, in order to produce
the distribution we find to exist. In the comparatively simple case of the Timor group, we
were able to deduce these changes with some approach to certainty. In the much more com-
plicated case of Celebes we can only indicate their general nature, since we now see the res-
ult, not of any single or recent change only, but of a whole series of the later revolutions
which have resulted in the present distribution of land in the Eastern Hemisphere.
