George Windsor Earl the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia", published in 1845, described how shallow seas connected islands on the west (Sumatra, Java, etc.) with the Asian continent and with similar wildlife, and islands on the east such as New Guinea were connected to Australia and were characterised by the presence of marsupials. This formed the insipiration for Alfred Russel Wallace to propose the faunal boundary line now known as the Wallace Line. He published a paper in 1850 that invented the term 'Indu-nesians', for a quaint racial classification, derived from the Latin for India and island. He published a seminal
Blakiston's Line and spiders, Hatta’s line (Soya line): for reptiles, amphibians and freshwater invertebrates, Hachisuka’s line for birds and Miyake’s line for insects. There has been speculation about why Blakiston was the person who discovered this faunal boundary line and no one before him had done so. Andrew Davis, who has been a professor at Hokkaido University for four years, argued that this may have been because of his unusual position in Japanese society as a European"." Blakiston spent much time researching bird species in Japan. At that time, Japanese ornithology was at its infancy. In 1886 Leonhard Stejneger remarked: "Our knowledge