conditions varied man from man, and changed race to race. But
experience refutes this. The English immigrant lives in the same
climate as the Australian or Tasmanian, but he has not become like
those races; nor will a thousand years, in most respects, make him
like them. The Papuan and the Malay, as Mr. Wallace finds, live now,
and have lived for ages, side by side in the same tropical regions,
with every sort of diversity. Even in animals his researches show,
as by an object-lesson, that the direct efficacy of physical
conditions is overrated. 'Borneo,' he says 'closely resembles New
Guinea, not only in its vast size and freedom from volcanoes, but in
its variety of geological structure, its uniformity of climate, and
the general aspect of the forest vegetation that clothes its
surface. The Moluccas are the counterpart of the Philippines in
their volcanic structure, their extreme fertility, their luxuriant
forests, and their frequent earthquakes; and Bali, with the east end
of Java, has a climate almost as arid as that of Timor. Yet between
these corresponding groups of islands, constructed, as it were,
after the same pattern, subjected to the same climate, and bathed by
the same oceans, there exists the greatest possible contrast, when
we compare their animal productions. Nowhere does the ancient
doctrine--that differences or similarities in the various forms of
life that inhabit different countries are due to corresponding
physical differences or similarities in the countries themselves--
meet with so direct and palpable a contradiction. Borneo and New
Guinea, as alike physically as two distinct countries can be, are
zoologically as wide as the poles asunder; while Australia, with its
dry winds, its open plains, its stony deserts and its temperate
climate, yet produces birds and quadrupeds which are closely related
to those inhabiting the hot, damp, luxuriant forests which
everywhere clothe the plains and mountains of New Guinea.' That is,