A FOSSIL CONTINENT. 683 



long before the mammoth and the mastodon had yet dreamed 

 of appearing upon the stage of existence, long before the first 

 shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on Nature's rough 

 draught of the still undeveloped and unspecialized lion, long be- 

 fore the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and colossal 

 giraffes of late Tertiary times had even begun to run their race 

 on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian conti- 

 nent found itself at an early period of its development cut off en- 

 tirely from all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, 

 and turned upon itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its 

 own plants and animals out of its own inner consciousness. The 

 natural consequence was, that progress in Australia has been ab- 

 surdly slow, and that the country as a whole has fallen most wo- 

 fully behind the times in all matters pertaining to the existence 

 of life upon its surface. Everybody knows that Australia as a 

 whole is a very peculiar and original continent ; its peculiarity, 

 however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact that it 

 still remains at very nearly the same early point of development 

 which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or there- 

 about. "Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, in- 

 deed, it is quite time nowadays that Australia should advance ; 

 for, so far, she has been left out of the running for some four 

 mundane ages or so at a rough computation. 



Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than pre- 

 cept ; so perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall 

 make the principle I wish to illustrate a trifle clearer to the Euro- 

 pean comprehension. In Australia, when Cook or Van Diemen 

 first visited it, there were no horses, cows, or sheep ; no rabbits, 

 weasels, or cats ; no indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the 

 pouched mammals or marsupials, familiarly typified to every one 

 of us by the mamma kangaroo in Regent's Park, who carries the 

 baby kangaroos about with her, neatly deposited in the sac or 

 pouch which Nature has provided for them instead of a cradle. 

 To this rough generalization, to be sure, two special exceptions 

 must needs be made ; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow 

 himself, and the dingo or wild dog, whose ancestors no doubt came 

 to the country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came 

 to England with George I of blessed memory. But of these two 

 solitary representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 

 " more anon " ; for the present we may regard it as approximately 

 true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the lump 

 was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, pha- 

 langers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial animals, 

 with names as strange and clumsy as their forms. 



Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in 

 the dry light of modern science ? Well, they are simply one of 



