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from the various islands of the Moluccan group is 265, but of these only 70 belong to the
usually abundant tribes of the waders and swimmers, indicating that these are very imper-
fectly known. As they are also pre-eminently wanderers, and are thus little fitted for illus-
trating 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 257 species of
land birds as residents or regular immigrants, we must look upon the numbers already pro-
cured 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 others. 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 New 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 pe-
culiar to the Moluccan islands, while 32 are found also in New Guinea, and 15 in the Indo-
Malay islands. These facts teach us, that though the birds of this group have evidently been
derived mainly from New Guinea, yet the immigration has not been a recent one, since there
has been time for the greater portion of the species to have become changed. We find, also,
that many very characteristic New Guinea forms have not entered the Moluccas at all, while
others found in Ceram and Gilolo do not extend so far west as Bouru. Considering, further,
the absence of most of the New Guinea mammals from the Moluccas, we are led to the con-
clusion that these islands are not fragments which have been separated from New Guinea,
but form a distinct insular region, which has been upheaved independently at a rather remote
epoch, and during all the mutations it has undergone has been constantly receiving immig-
rants from that great and productive island. The considerable length of time the Moluccas
