Note 916 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

What islands have they tend to hold, to segregate, secrete from meddling hands, preserve untouched and unaltered. Owing to this power to protect, islands show a large percentage of rare archaic forms of animal and plant life. The insular fauna of Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and Madagascar display a succession of strange, ancestral forms going back to the biological infancy of the world. The Canaries in the Atlantic and Celebes In the Pacific are museums of living antiquities, some of them dating probably from Miocene times.916 Such survivals are found elsewhere only in high mountains, whose inaccessible slopes also offer protection against excessive competition. Hence some of the antiquated species of insular Celebes, Formosa, Japan and Hainon occur again on the Asiatic mainland only in the Himalayas.917