THE PACIFIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 June 1928, Page 9

THE PACIFIC

•‘OCEAN PACKED WITH ISLANDS.” For the Pacific as a whole perhaps the most magnificent feature of land distribution is the extension of Asia south-eastward* through the Malay Peninsula and on through Sumatra, Java, Celebes, Ceram, Papua—five big islands associated with many small islands in such manner as to form nearly continuous land (writes Dr Herbert E. Gregory, director of the Bishop Museum at Honolulu, in his work, “The Geography of the Pacific”). And beyond Papua, as, far as Fiji the is packed ‘With islands. • •. y In essence this great region of Indonesia and Melanesia is a suburb of Asia. In age and composition its locks are those of the continent; its animals and plants predominantly are those which now live or once lived on the larger land mass. Human beings like those of the AsituJc continent have been living in this suburb doubtless since this form of animal life has been in existence. The earliest, trace, of human beings on earth is the fossil remains of a man-like creature which lived in Java some 600,000 years ago. It may well be that in Indo-China and adjoining islands originated the first groups of human beings that hunted animals, caught fish, eftoked food, and built shelters, and that their descendants migrated to Malaya, and Indoppwia before western Asia, Europe, and Africa were known. . . . But the oceanic islands offered no facilities for migration. They mark out no route from anywhere to anywhere. They are small, wide spaced, irregularly distributed, and for plants and man to reach them involves, exceptional conditions. Few of . the plants and still lower of the animals common 1.0 Asia, and Hie Americas found in the .Polynesian Islands, ami it is doubtful if human beings saw them before Rome had extended her Empire into Syria, Germania* Gaul, and Britain. But even these scattered islands are much more closely related to Asia than to America. Their plant and animal affinities are predominately Asiatic. In a geographical sense the Pacific is an. Asiatic ocean. The remoteness of its connection with the Americas is an outstanding geographic feature.