140 THE WANDERINGS OF ANIMALS [OH. 



the Malay Islands. Such monkeys are known from 

 Miocene Europe, even an ape-like Dryopiihecm. 

 The famous Pithecanthropus erectus of Java is but 

 of Pleistocene date and would do well enough for 

 ancestral man, if we did not feel sure that the genus 

 Homo must date back at least into the Pliocene epoch. 

 But that is another story. 



SUMMARY OF MAMMALIAN DISPERSAL. 



Australia as the earliest great mass of land 

 permanently severed from the rest is in almost un- 

 disturbed possession of the lowest mammals. It is 

 the sole refuge of the monotremes, and the marsupials 

 have narrowly escaped a similar fate. They take us 

 to the next independent continent, South America. 

 This had three chances, or epochs, of being stocked 

 with mammals. Within the Cretaceous period it 

 seems to have received its marsupial stock from the 

 north, the progenitors of all modern marsupials. 

 A second influx, during the early Tertiary brought 

 edentates and rodents as its first Placentals from 

 Africa, and those queer Ungulates the Toxodonts 

 and Pyrotheria, unless we prefer to look upon these 

 Eocene extinct orders as truly aboriginal to South 

 America, when this was still continuous with the 

 ancient Brazil-Afro-Indian Gondwanaland. The third 

 and last inroad came once more from the north, when 



