THE OPOSSUM 



39 



and by Hernandez, whose history of Mexico was printed 

 in 1626, and by many others. But not then or till more 

 than 200 years afterward did even men of science ap- 

 preciate how great a novelty had been met with in this 

 new animal. The habit of carrying its young in a 

 pouch, and the fact that the hind paw (as in monkeys) 

 was formed like a hand, were duly noted. The anatomy 

 of a female specimen was described by Tyson in 1698 

 under the title of the " Anatomie of the Oposum," the 

 year before he published his " Anatomie of a Pigmie," 

 referred to before. A male specimen was also described 

 by William Cooper in 1704. But however fully the 

 creature's structure was investigated, the significance of 

 its organisation remained hidden from men's eyes. 



The exceptional nature of those flying beasts, the bats, 

 was appreciated early, but not that of those marine 

 beasts, the whales and porpoises. At the coronation 

 feast of King Richard II., which took place in West- 

 minster Hall on a Friday, roast porpoise figured on 

 the board among the other dishes to be eaten on a 

 day of abstinence, when flesh meat was forbidden food. 

 Little did the first observers of the opossum imagine 

 that the difference between a bat and a mouse, or that 

 between a porpoise and a sheep, was as nothing compared 

 with the difference which existed between the opossum 

 and the racoon, or between the opossum and any other 

 beast then known in Europe or America. 



In order that this should be understood it needed that 

 other creatures more or less allied to the opossum should 

 be elsewhere discovered. The first sign of the coming 

 revelation was the mistaken opinion that the opossum ex- 

 isted in the East Indies. Pison, in his history of Brazil, 

 says that such a breed was called " cous-cous ; " and 

 Seba, in the middle of the eighteenth century, stated 



