The first of them, read before the Zoological Society in January, 1863, gave some detailed information about his collection of birds brought from Buru. In this he showed that the island was originally one of the Moluccan group, as every bird found there which was not widely distributed was either identical with or closely allied to Moluccan species, while none had special affinities with Celebes. It was clear, then, that this island formed the most westerly outlier of the Moluccan group. The next paper of importance, read before the same Society in November (1863), was on the birds of the chain of islands extending from Lombok to the great island of Timor. This included a list of 186 species of birds, of which twenty-nine were altogether new. A special feature of the paper was that it enabled him to mark out precisely the boundary line between the Indian and Australian zoological regions, and to trace the derivation of the rather peculiar fauna of these islands, partly from Australia and partly from the Moluccas, but with a strong recent migration of Javanese species due to the very narrow straits separating most of the islands from each other. In "My Life" some interesting tables are given to illustrate how the two streams of immigration entered these islands, and further that "as its geological structure shows ... Timor is the older island and received immigrants from Australia at a period when, probably, Lombok and Flores had not come into existence or were unhabitable.... We can," he says, "feel confident that Timor has not been connected with Australia, because it has none of the peculiar Australian mammalia, and also because many of the commonest and most widespread groups of Australian birds are entirely wanting."[2] Two other papers, dealing with parrots and pigeons respectively (1864-5), were thought by Wallace himself to be among the most important of his studies of geographical distribution. Writing of them he says: "These peculiarities of distribution and coloration in two such very diverse groups of birds interested me greatly, and I endeavoured to explain them in accordance with the laws of Natural Selection."