Corinda
sampi1 Brisbane
negri Queensland
2 Mar. 1910.
Dear Mentor & [illeg.]
dengan Tuan Pandi skali[?]
The real and only test of a good book is that familiarity therewith doesn't tell you what is in it. Now there's a book all about the benatangs, the kupu-kupus, the burongs and the batus of the Negri Orang Malayu [Malay: the Malay People] that I read several times a year for thirty years or so, but only twice in the last 5 years, and my copy has got so transmuted into Mechlin lace with silver-fish, cockroaches, white ants and other appreciators of high-class literature that it has become impossible for library purposes, and only adaptable as a fichu2. (Violet will tell you if this term is technically exact). So yesterday I foraged our Royal Soc. and bore off its two evergreen volumes, and lay awake half the night with visions of the "summer isles of Eden", and having a silent bitchara[?] all to myself in cooing bahasa Malayu. I know that as the proverb hath it "hornbills with hornbills, each with what suits it". (Yang enggang itu amas enggang juga, dan yang patut itu same patut juga). And I found new meanings and new suggestions for I was am re-tilling the old soil. Here's one and its consequences, from the very first chapter.
The Wallace-Windsor-Earl Line, Cap.I vol i.p.21 orig.ed. Cockatoos on the west of Bali show "the intermingling of the productions of these islands is now going on." [2]3
You remember I said your true line seemed to prove too much: the birds & insects ought long ago to have got across in sufficient numbers to smudge out the line. Between Sulu (not Sula) and Borneo is even narrower than between Bali & Lombok — say 10 miles — yet is as strongly marked[?]: it staggered me with very big staggers. You say (as long ago as your first ed.) the change is recent, say Miocene; you say spp. may arise quickly, e.g. in 500 years. You worked out the fact that the Tertiary sea was very extensive in Mid-Sunda. Now all these things are true & quite wonderful discoveries at a time when so little was known of the geology.
Yet I can't help thinking you have missed, or very underestimated, one f the most important factors. It is the effect of the elevation of the bed of the Opal Sea upon the climate of the Archipelago. You point out splendidly that it begins in E. Java and is felt far away towards New Guinea. Now this aridity would favour the Australian types and be detrimental to the Asiatic. Surely one of the chief reasons for the difference between the two faunas (and floras to a lesser degree) is not that the Asiatic forms can't get there, but that they can't live there.
But this though it helps to explain this particular case, does not explain the reason for case of Sulu-Borneo. True the main islands of Sulu are now almost devoid of forests, but this is quite recent & its effect would only to be to kill off certain forest forms, not to introduce other forms. The whole question in fact appears to me to be pointing to an universal change in late Tertiary times.
Prochoerus
I have not yet been able to get hold of De Vis4 about this, & as I told [3]5 you the present man knew nothing about the matter & we could not find the specimens. H. Tryon, our Govt. entomologist, remembers the original specimens and tells me he remarked to De Vis that the bones seemed miniature[?] and he hints at the possibility of this being young Wombat jaws: though there seem to be difficulties about this. Anyway I must wait till I can see De Vis before using this doubtful Ungulate. Its Peccary affinities if true would be very puzzling, more so than its use (to me) as an early Australian placental, for Dicotyles6 is originally N. American & only got into S.A. in the Pliocene[?], which is far too late, in my opinion, for the Antarctic connection between S. America & Australia.
S. American Marsupials &c.
First let me reiterate that granting the European S & N. American mesozoic forms are marsupial (which is by no means proved) there could only be the ancestors of Didelphidae, and these have only the remotest and probably not even a genetic relationship with our marsupials.
[illeg. struckthrough sentence]
I am comforted by a note of Lyddekers (Knowledge,Dec.1909) about <Coelouartes>, the S.Am. living diprotodont both gibed me about, and called me names 'cos I said I did not think its Aust. affinities proved. L says any resemblance "is due to convergence and not to genetic affinity" & that there is "no important character linking <Colouartes> with the diprotodonts". Since he looks upon it as "the last survivor of a host of extinct S.Am. marsupials."
This is as it may be: even those marsupials haven't been proved to be like the Australian types, but on this I wait news from Princetown. Every blessed fellow who turns up a lost rag-&-bone shop shouts out "All other fellow's bones came from my shop". It is overdoing the man-&-brother business. As poor [4]7 Artemus Ward hath it: the Nigger may be a man and a brother, but he is <not?> all my brothers and sisters too, and my father and mother, and my uncles and aunts, and my cousin in the country. Why should our Australian wares be of the made in Germany or evolved in Patagonia Type type? I guess we had more dry land in Tert. times to grow a vertebrate crop on than all S. America could scrape together.
We simply MUST admit parallel development. Even Lyddeker, who is as cautious as he is wise, sees this. Look at the reptilian Theromorphs and then appreciate how much we lose if we don't utilise this proven fact: but it must be tempered with discretion.
Then if our marsupials came via Shackleton's port[?] then they ought to have got to N. Zealand. How clearly you saw that it was to the mammals we must chiefly trust — and this in the sixties! I wonder at your foresight — and admire.
Now this brings me to another point. Mammals did not get to Java until late Tertiary times. Why? Java wasn't there ! It was only a few (or a lot of) dime-sized rocklets like Banda[?]: and probably this is true of all the E. Archip. including the peninsula of Malaya & the Siamese bulge. They were all connected in palaeozoic times, probably all in early Mesozoic, but from then on to Late Tert. they were reduced to islets. Then came the great upheaval which has been succeeded by a small depression wh[ich] has once more made an archipelago. So much is certain from the geology. See how my work only makes yours SPLENDIDER than ever!8
The Transformation Since[?]
Look at "Malay Arch". vol.i. cap.viii, p 211. orig. edn. Rub your eyes, and hear me chuckle! You very nearly dug the pit you think I have [5]9 fallen into!! I have put it into a separate screed (enclosed). I can't help poking fun, but believe me there is no toxin in my secretion. The little joke re "little" & "small" &c. is only for literary purpose — the sentence is quite right for you were emphasizing not diagnosing, but I put the poor joke into a lawyer's lips, where it is fitting, for does he stickle at truth to win a case! Anyhow I hope Violet & William will smile.
Winyardia
I have this moment received from R.M.Johnston, of Tasmania, (Govt. Statistician, Registrar General & the best Tas. palaeontologist) a sketch of the position of this unique find. You see it is at the Top, aye, the toppiest Top of the Palaeogene — NOT Eocene, NOT Pliocene, but Oligocene or lower Miocene. I copy his sketch:
[Here a hand-drawn diagram of a geological cross-section, basalt peaks (A) with an intervening valley weathered into the underlying sandstone (B). Mark (x) in (B) at the valley edge. Titled: Table Cape Marine Beds, Tas.]
A. Capping of Olivine Basalt. 40ft.
B. Turritella Sandstones (Palaeogene) 40ft.
x Position where Marsupial was found.
C. Unconformable floor of Permo-Carboniferous glacial drift boulder beds and conglomerate.
He writes, "The extinct marsupial Wynyardia bassiana (Spruce) was obtained from the uppermost bed of the Turritella Sandstone at Table Cape (Palaeogene)." This, as far as I can find, is the oldest marsupial yet found in Australia, [6]10for Tas is part of Aust. Now it isnt here I'd look for my intermediate types, but up in N. Qld. where I hope to find evidence if I can get there again: but distances are so great, cost so prohibitive, that I must wait. My weak point — and I feel it as if I sat on it — is that no intermediate forms are yet known. But then the important area is not searched. The strong point is that no early mammal of possible forerunner has ever been found in Australia or in the Malay Arch. and Java has been very thoroughly searched. Nor has any marsupial been found anywhere in Asia — save of course the islands of Austro-Malaya which (I maintain) were fed from Australia.
Of course the presence of low types with marsupial tendencies in Patagonia seems at first to point in that direction for a source, but both you and I see insuperable difficulties about it. I'd as soon welcome a Patagonian ancestry as one from N. Guinea or Timor, I only gave birth to the heretic idea I am not wedded to it: I only want to get at the facts.
Plants
I left off and went for half an hour's stroll and gathered for you, just as a reminder, some seedling Wattles showing the first pennate leaves and the passages into the leafless phylloidal condition. Naturally, you are as familiar with the facts as I am, but they are daily before my eyes — so I pulled up a few... Cyril White says if you want herbarium specimens of Aust. plants he'll send them. Hope you have got Amaryllis &c from W.Bartell's & grass[?] from Maj. Sankey11 by this. Tell V. they haven't sent the Qld. postcards (promised) yet, but they will come.
With kindest regards from both of us to all of you | Yours always | Sydney B.J. Skertchly [signature]
Status: Draft transcription [Letter (WCP2978.2868)]
For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon
Certified Copy
of an unwritten report in the unpublished Australian journal
"Alpha Censori"
of the first of April 1910.
Certificate I hereby solemnly declare and swear that I have never heard of the article referred to, nor does any journal of that name exist within 90° of the S. Pole.
(sgd.) S. Jultus
Press housemen[?] to the Commonwealth
A GEOLOGIST CONVICTED OF GUILE!
IMPERTIENT IMPENTINENCE!!
DR. A. R. WALLACE'S NEW MOTTO!!!
"Marsupialia placentalia demper"
In the court of common pleas, before which all zoological questions are brought, Sydney B. J. Sturchey, geologist and gadabout, of the uttermost parts of the earth and elsewhere, was found guilty of stealing from Dr. A. Russel Wallace, bird-of-paradise manufacturer, late of the Malay archipelago but now of the Galaxy, the idea that Marsupials may have once been Placentals and vice-versa. Mr. D. Arwin, N.S., S.S.E.,1appeared for the plaintiff and Mr. L. A'March O.E., S. N.,2 for the defendant.
It appears that some time about the middle of last century the[[2] plaintiff designed, invented and manufactured an extensive group of islands known as the Malay Archipelago, with which constant communication is now maintained by Wallace's line, the P. & O., the Ned. Ind. and Menagerie[?] Mauritius. These islands he peopled entirely out of his own head, his masterpiece being a kind of flying nightmare, the rough idea of which was sketched from a fever-vision. to this remarkable and singularly useful invention he gave the sweetly suphorous[?] name of Kubong[?], afterwards what shortened to
Galespithecus volaus
which is the subject of this action. Being inherently but materialised delirium its deisgner didn't clearly know what it really was, and in his book "The Malay Archipelago" vol.i, cap. viii, p.211 org.[?] edu. wrote as follows: —
" I once shot a female, with a very small blind and naked little creature clinging closely to its breast, which was quite bare and much wrinkled, reminding me of the young of marsupials, to which it seemed to form "a transition."3
It was, continued the named counsel, the last phrase als which the plaintif basely filched — or in the language of the southern savage he imparts[?] "shook" i.e. stole. Had this case-hardened sinner adopted part of the earlier patious[?] adopted the first part of the sentence and falsely claimed that he, too, had invented "a VERY SMALL" creature which was also LITTLE it would not have surprised him (the learned counsel) even though for decency's sake, he had put it in pants instead[3] leaving it chemically[?] naked. The very fact that he did not is proof positive of the defendant's malignity!
Here the judge interposed and asked how to spell the name of the human inhabitants of the land — he had got it MALAISE which seemed to savour of French. The learned doctor complimented his lordship on his philogical acumen. He had at first always written the name of the country MALAISIA which cartographers corrupted into MALAYSIA, and he now regretted, too late alas, that he had not adhered to his first idea that was MALARIA. It was of this land of his own creation that the poet wrote:
" After life's FITFUL fever, he sleeps: well, if he's taken quinine; But if he drinks Piijt[?], it will sew him up quite and make him a Used-to-have-Been".
The learned counsel, continuing, pointed out that papoose Gales Pithy Curses though very small and naked (i.e. having no small clothes) and though little as well as small were not insignificant. Indeed they the species had already won a record, a championship, as the worst fliers on the planet. A chunk of inanimate mica-skirt[?], he assured his lordship, could fall down a precipice quicker than the pitihiest cuss in Malaria could fly down a nibong tree. But the chief claim of the Pithy Curses was a moral one. They, and they only, in the dark ages of the sixties, had dimly foreshadowed the primordial placentation[?] of the metatheria[?].
His lordship said it sounded shocking and ordered ladies to withdraw. Dr. Wallace explained that he didnt really mean it, but that as it was[4] in his book he wasnt going to let any lop-earred, wallaby-chewing, stone-marker[?] under crux[?] australis get the benefit of it.
The defendant plaintiff made a sorry exhibition of equivocation, when we state that he declared that you couldnt drink a Blackfellow's gin, that Blackboys grew on Grass Trees, and that Paddy Melons hopped about the ground on their hind legs, it was evident that this was either more wanton prevarication or a clumsy attempt to feign insanity.
His lordship donned the Black-Cap (currusca atricapilla), a fine male, in summer plumage and full song, sentenced the delinquent to death by choking him with his own words, and ordered his corpse to be buried fathoms deep in the pliocene clays of Lake Eyre[?].
Dr. Wallace left the court amid the deafening acclamation of his friends without a stain on his reputation — not even a trace or tinge of Schulz's solution or hematoxylin[?].
(Attestation: sworn and declared before me to be in every particular a faithful incorrect copy of a non-existent journal of great worthlessness.
O. Law
Notary Public]
Counde[?] Qld.
3.iii.10.
Status: Draft transcription [Enclosure (WCP2978.5348)]
For more information about the transcriptions and metadata, see https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/content/epsilon
Please cite as “WCP2978,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 25 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP2978