A FOSSIL CONTINENT. 693 



In the oldest Secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there 

 occur in abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as 

 the Ceratodi. (I apologize for ganoid, though it is not a swear- 

 word.) These teeth reappear from time to time in several sub- 

 sequent formations, but at last slowly die out altogether ; and of 

 course all naturalists naturally concluded that the creature to 

 which they belonged had died out also, and was long since num- 

 bered with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea that a ceratodus 

 could still be living, far less that it formed an important link in 

 the development of all the higher animals, could never for a 

 moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a 

 palaeolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or to 

 discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encir- 

 cled summit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live ceratodus from 

 a modern estuary. In 1870, however^ Mr. Krefft took away the 

 breath of scientific Europe by informing it that he had found the 

 extinct ganoid swimming about as large as life, and six feet long, 

 without the faintest consciousness of its own scientific importance, 

 in a river of Queensland at the present day. The unsophisticated 

 aborigines knew it as barramunda ; the almost equally ignorant 

 white settlers called it with irreverent and unfilial contempt the 

 flat-head. On further examination, however, the desj)ised barra- 

 munda proved to be a connecting link of primary rank between 

 the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest air-breathing 

 animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true fish, it 

 leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging 

 expedition after vegetable food in the neighboring woodlands. 

 There it browses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise be- 

 haves itself in a manner wholly unbecoming its piscine anteced- 

 ents and aquatic education. To fit it for this strange amphibious 

 life, the barramunda has both lungs and gills ; it can breathe 

 either air or water at will, or, if it chooses, the two together. 

 Though covered with scales, and most fish-like in outline, it pre- 

 sents points of anatomical resemblance both to salamanders and liz- 

 ards ; and, as a connecting bond between the North American mud- 

 fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the other, 

 it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher 

 animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine 

 ancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living 

 fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in 

 the fossil continent, Australia. Everyvfhere else it has long since 

 been beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian 

 descendants ; in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence 

 as the last relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct fam- 

 ily. — CornJiill Magazine. 



