Sumatra Has Also Been Evidently
Much Increased In Size By The Formation Of Alluvial Plains Along
Its Northeastern Coasts.
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 Burma 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 near 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, subsequent to the separation of Java, Borneo
became almost entirely submerged, and on its re-elevation 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 distribution 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 unable even to imagine how they could have
been brought about.
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