would counterbalance the preponderating conditions of another. Now such a locality is really found in the case before us in the relations already noticed between the north-east point of Timor and Cape Van Diemen; so that, _upon the whole_, the _a priori_ views are as much in favour of the Timor range of islands, being the connecting link between Australia and the Continent, as they are in favour of New Guinea being so. The distinction just indicated is of more importance, as illustrative of a general principle, than as a fact affecting the particular point in question. The special facts of the case are, in the mind of the present writer, in favour of Timor and _not New Guinea_, having been the quarter from whence Australia was peopled, the particular part of the Timorian stock being, of course, the darker, wilder, and, apparently, more ancient tribes of the west and of the interior. 2. _Of the Polynesians._--In investigating the relations between Polynesia and the Continent, with an exclusive view to the land-and-sea conditions between the different portions of the connecting series of islands, we should at once derive the population of the Eastern Archipelagoes from the islands which lay nearest to them on the west, and so proceed until we came to the Samoan Archipelago, to the Tonga group, or to the Fijis. These we should connect with the New Hebrides, or Solomon's Isles, and these last with New Guinea, the Moluccas, and the Continent. We should then assume a spread of the population, as far to the North and East as it had been found to occur westwards; and so derive the Micronesians from the northern Polynesians. We should not be afraid of even deriving the people of the Pelew Islands from the same quarter; the similarity of language and habits having already been recognised, and the distance between the Pelews and the nearest portion of Protonesia being greater than (or at least as great as) any interspace of ocean between Polynesia and the Continent. I say that this is what we should do if we looked exclusively to the discovery of that line of connexion where the land-and-sea conditions should be the most favourable; in other words, where the interspaces of sea should be the smallest. Nevertheless, in so doing we should, probably, commit an error in our inference, and certainly violate a principle in our method; a principle which has been suggested in a previous[83] part of the present Volume, and which is founded upon the circumstance of the population of the line of the Papuan Islands, being _not Amphinesian but Negrito_: so that the ethnological continuity, and the geographical continuity, disagree; a fact which throws us upon a line of greater geographical, but of less ethnological complexity; and in favour of which the probabilities arise out of a composition of the conflicting difficulties. This is the line from either the Philippines, or the northern Moluccas to the Pelews (_via_ Lord North's Isle, Sonsoral,