692 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of the larger conti- 

 nents that the colonists always call them, in perfect good faith, by 

 the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koala poses 

 as a small bear ; the cuscus answers to the raccoons of America. 

 The pouched badgers explain themselves at once by their very 

 name, like the Plyants, the Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the 

 Carelesses of the Restoration comedy. The "native rabbit" of 

 Swan River is a rabbit - like bandicoot ; the pouched ant-eater 

 similarly takes the place of the true ant-eater of other continents. 

 By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian devil is a fierce and savage 

 marsupial analogue of the American wolverine ; a smaller species 

 of the same type usurps the name and place of the marten ; and 

 the dog-headed thylacinus is in form and figure precisely like a 

 wolf or a jackal. The pouched weasels are very weasel-like ; the 

 kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats and mice a 

 close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in this con- 

 nection, that the one marsupial family which could compete with 

 higher American life, the opossums, are, so to speak, the monkey 

 development of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, 

 which make their feet almost into hands ; they have prehensile 

 tails, by which they hang from branches in true monkey fashion ; 

 they lead an arboreal omnivorous existence ; they feed off fruits, 

 birds' eggs, insects, and roots ; and altogether they are just active, 

 cunning, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys. 



Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than any of 

 these, a living fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly 

 immemorial and primitive antiquity. The story of its discovery 

 teems with the strangest romance of natural history. To those 

 who could appreciate the facts of the case it was just as curious 

 and just as interesting as though we were now to discover some- 

 where in an unknown island or an African oasis some surviving 

 mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some gigantic and mis- 

 shapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals of the Crys- 

 tal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a 

 tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and 

 astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 

 " swam into their ken " in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, 

 in size and shape this " extinct fish," still living and grunting 

 quietly in our midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 

 " dragons of the prime " immortalized in a famous stanza by 

 Tennyson: but to the, true enthusiast, size is nothing; and the 

 barramunda is just as much a marvel and a monster as the Atlan- 

 tosaurus himself would have been if he had suddenly walked upon 

 the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of lizard-like tail in a train 

 behind him. And this is the plain story of that marvelous dis- 

 covery of a " missing link " in our own pedigree. 



