CHAPTER IV
AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHY
Australia Hitherto we have compared Australasian colonies to the
is a con- United Kingdom or to one of its parts. Thus Fiji equals tinent like ° , , _ , , .
Europe, Wales, Middle Island (N.Z.) equals England and Wales,
British New Guinea equals England, Wales, and Ireland, or three-fourths of the United Kingdom. These puny standards must now be laid on one side, for Australia is built upon a continental scale. It is 2,972,906 square miles in extent, is to Europe as British New Guinea is to the United Kingdom, and could contain 39 Great Britains, 99 Scotlands, or 113 Tasmanias with ease. and is con- Australia is as unlike its neighbours in quality as it is wüAJV Z * n Q uanut y- From the point of view of students of botany in its flora and natural history the Asiatic world ends, and the Austra- and fauna, ]agian wor]d begins at the Straits of Lombok, a little east of Java. In this new world there are many regions, of which New Zealand and Australia are most like themselves and most unlike one another. If a New Zealander had come to Australia before the days of Cook, he would have felt like the denizen of a strange planet. New Zealand has no native mammals. 1 Australia abounds in the two lowest sub-classes of the mammalian class—monotremes such as ornithorynchus and echidna — and marsupials whose name is legion. Marsupials and monotremes exist also in New Guinea and a few neighbouring islands ; two non- Australian kinds of marsupials — coenolestes and opossums — exist in America; otherwise all living mammals belong neither to the monotreme nor to the marsupial but to the eutherian sub-class. Rats, bats, dogs, and men are the only
1 Unless a native otter exists.