the feathered tribes. The number of species of birds at
present known 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 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 257 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 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 peculiar 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 Ne^\r 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 Gilplo do not extend so far west as Boiiru.
Considering, further, the absence of most of the New Guinea
mammals from the Moluccas, we are led to the conclusion
that these islands are not fragments which have been
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