A FOSSIL CONTINENT. 689 



in its own class as the puzzle-monkey and the casnarina are among 

 forest-trees. No feathered creatures so closely approach the lizard - 

 tailed birds of the oolite or the toothed birds of the Cretaceous 

 period as do these Australian and New Zealand emus and apte- 

 ryxes. Again, while many characteristic Oriental families are 

 quite absent, like the vultures, woodpeckers, pheasants, and bul- 

 buls, the Australian region has many other fairly ancient birds, 

 found nowhere else on the surface of our modern planet. Such are 

 the so-called brush-turkeys and mound-builders, the only feathered 

 things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them to be 

 hatched after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or of 

 fermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, 

 the lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Austra- 

 lian region. So are the wonderful and aesthetic bower-birds. 

 Brush-tongued lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously colored 

 pigeons, though somewhat less antique, perhaps, in type, give a 

 special character to the bird-life of the country. And in New 

 Guinea, an isolated bit of the same old continent, the birds-of- 

 paradise, found nowhere else in the whole world, seem to recall 

 some forgotten Eden of the remote past, some golden age of Sa- 

 turnian splendor. Poetry apart, into which I have dropped for a 

 moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds-of-paradise are, in fact, 

 gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest-life in a rich 

 fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and ene- 

 mies unknown. 



Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have 

 passed over to Australia at various times by pure chance. They 

 fall into two classes — the rats and mice, who doubtless got trans- 

 ported across on floating logs or balks of timber ; and the human 

 importations, including the dog, who came, perhaps, on their own 

 canoes, perhaps on the wreck and debris of inundations. Yet 

 even in these cases, again, Australia still maintains its proud pre- 

 eminence as the most antiquated and unprogressive of continents. 

 For the Australian black-fellow must have got there a very long 

 time ago, indeed ; he belongs to an extremely ancient human type, 

 and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the Neanderthal sav- 

 age and other early prehistoric races ; while the woolly-headed 

 Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family, and, 

 perhaps, the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to 

 modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier 

 still, his brethren on the mainland having, no doubt, been exter- 

 minated later on, when the stone-age Australian black-fellows first 

 got cast ashore upon the continent inhabited by the yet more bar- 

 baric and helpless negritto race. As for the dingo, or Australian 

 wild dog, only half domesticated by the savage natives, he repre- 

 sents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and half jackal, incapa- 



TOL. ZXXIII. a 



