A FOSSIL CONTINENT. 687 



For the opossums form the only memibers of the m.arsupial 

 class now living outside Australia; and yet, what is at least 

 equally remarkable, none of the opossums are found per contra 

 in Australia itself. They are, in fact, the highest and best prod- 

 uct of the old dying marsupial stock, specially evolved in the great 

 continents through the fierce competition of the higher mammals 

 then being developed on every side of them. Therefore, being 

 later in point of time than the separation, they could no more get 

 over to Australia than the elephants and tigers and rhinoceroses 

 could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race in its 

 hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins. 

 In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite of com- 

 petition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side with 

 hog-like creatures not yet perfectly piggish, with nondescript ani- 

 mals, half horse, half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and 

 antelopes, unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding 

 antlers. But in the succeeding age they seem to disappear from 

 the Eastern continent, though in the Western, thanks to their hand- 

 like feet, opposable thumb, and tree-haunting life, they still drag 

 out a precarious existence in many forms from Virginia to Chili, 

 and from Brazil to California. It is worth while to notice, too, 

 that whereas the kangaroos and other Australian marsupials are 

 proverbially the very stupidest of mammals, the opossums, on the 

 contrary, are well known to those accurate observers of animal 

 psychology, the plantation negroes, to be the very cleverest, cun- 

 ningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fierce strug- 

 gle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum was 

 absolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smart- 

 ness, or else to be improved off the face of the earth by the keen 

 comiDetition of the pouchless mammals. 



Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, 

 landing for the first time on the coast of New South "Wales, saw 

 an animal with short front limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, 

 and a curious habit of hopping along the ground (called by the 

 natives a kangaroo), the opossums of America were the only 

 pouched mammals known to the European world in any part of 

 the explored continents. Australia, severed from the rest of the 

 earth — penitus toto orbe divisa — ever since the end of the second- 

 ary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in the secondary age so 

 far as its larger life-elements were concerned, and presented to the 

 first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of what " the 

 world before the flood " must have looked like. Only it was a very 

 remote flood ; an antediluvian age separated from our own not by 

 thousands but by millions of seasons. 



To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needful 

 qualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is 



