It Is No Doubt Very Difficult To Account For The Presence Of
Some Of The Few Mammals That Do Exist In Timor, Especially The Tiger
Cat And The Deer.
We must consider, however, that during thousands,
and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, these islands and the seas
between them have been subjected to volcanic action.
The land has been
raised and has sunk again; the straits have been narrowed or widened;
many of the islands may have been joined and dissevered again; violent
floods have again and again devastated the mountains and plains,
carrying out to sea hundreds of forest trees, as has often happened
during volcanic eruptions in Java; and it does not seem improbable
that once in a thousand, or ten thousand years, there should have
occurred such a favourable combination of circumstances as would lead
to the migration of two or three land animals from one island to
another. This is all that we need ask to account for the very scanty
and fragmentary group of Mammalia which now inhabit the large island
of Timor. The deer may very probably have been introduced by man, for
the Malays often keep tame fawns; and it may not require a thousand,
or even five hundred years, to establish new characters in an animal
removed to a country so different in climate and vegetation as is
Timor from the Moluccas. I have not mentioned horses, which are often
thought to be wild in Timor, because there are no grounds whatever for
such a belief.
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