The Koorile island extends to the south as far as Saghalien and Yesso. The Japanese chain runs southward as far as Cape Corea, and includes the great island of Niphon with numerous smaller ones, embracing an area of 164,000 square miles. Then follow:— The Loo-Choo islands as far as Formosa. The single island of Formosa, 13,000 square miles. The coast island of Hainan, 16,450 square miles. The numerous group of the Philippines, with the adjacent islands, 121,000 square miles. The greater Sunda group, with its adjoining archipelago, 689,500 square miles. Of these, Borneo embraces 295,600 square miles; Sumatra, 167,700 square miles; Java, 54,600 square miles; and Celebes, 72,600 square miles. The smaller Sunda group, 29,200 square miles. The scattered group of the Moluccas, with the Banda and Ternate islands, 7950 square miles. The great island of New Guinea, 262,800 square miles, which forms the transition of the Australian group. On the south coast of Deccan, the great island of Ceylon, 25,860 square miles. These rows and groups of islands, embracing an aggregate of 1,095,000 square miles, form a kind of insular isthmus from the southeastern extremity of Asia to the northwest of Australia, though broken by unnumbered straits. If lines be drawn from Sumatra and from Hainan to Cape York, on the north coast of Australia, an ideal isthmus would be formed not unlike that which connects North and South America. If this insular isthmus be further conceived to have been thrown up by volcanic forces, as that of Panama seems to have been, an addition of 1,095,000 square miles has been made in this way to the most productive portions of the world. So great is the accession of territory that it has become the abode of a distinct race—the Malay—which hardly finds a home at all on the Asiatic shore. Asia has received very little advantage from this vast archipelago. Only the southeast coast has been affected by it; the continent, as a whole, has not been reached by its influence. On the contrary, Australia has been largely affected by it in its productive and ethnographical character. Not only was it first discovered through the agency of these islands, but it probably derives its population from them; it has received many of its animals and plants from them—the sugar-cane, the sago palm, the bread-fruit tree, the dog, and the swine.