690 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ble of tlie higher canine traits, and with, a suspicions, ferocious, 

 glaring eye, that betrays at once his uncivilizable tendencies. 



Omitting these later importations, however — the modern plants, 

 birds, and human beings — it may be fairly said that Australia is 

 still in its Secondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached 

 the Tertiary and Quaternary periods. Here, again, however, a 

 deduction must be made, in order to attain the necessary accuracy. 

 Even in Australia the world never stands still. Though the Aus- 

 tralian animals are still at bottom the European and Asiatic ani- 

 mals of the Secondary age, they are those animals with a dijffer- 

 ence. They have undergone an evolution of their own. It has 

 not been the evolution of the great continents ; but it has been 

 evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, more re- 

 stricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare the 

 difference to the difference between the civilization of Europe 

 and the civilization of Mexico or Peru, The Mexicans, when Cor- 

 tes blotted out their indigenous culture, were still, to be sure, in 

 their stone age ; but it was a very different stone age from that of 

 the cave-dwellers or the mound-builders in Britain. Even so, 

 though Australia is still zoologically in the Secondary period, it is 

 a Secondary period a good deal altered and adapted in detail to 

 meet the wants of special situations. 



The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhyn- 

 chus and the echidna, the " beast with a bill " and the " porcupine 

 ant-eater " of popular natural history. These curious creatures, 

 genuine living fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate 

 place between the mammals on the one hand and the birds and 

 lizards on the other. The echidna has no teeth, and a very bird- 

 like skull and body ; the ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, 

 webbed feet, and a great many quaint anatomical peculiarities 

 which closely ally it to the birds and reptiles. Both, in fact, are 

 early arrested stages in the development of mammals from the old 

 common vertebrate ancestor ; and they could only have struggled 

 on to our own day in a continent free from the severe competition 

 of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europe and 

 Asia. Even in Australia itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna 

 have had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy 

 of Nature, The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, special- 

 ized in a thousand minute ways for his amphibious life and queer 

 subterranean habits ; the second is a spiny, hedgehog-like noctur- 

 nal prowler, who buries himself in the earth during the day, and 

 lives by night on insects which he licks up greedily with his long, 

 ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the specializations brought about 

 by their necessary adaptation to a particular niche in the economy 

 of life, these two quaint and very ancient animals probably pre- 

 serve for us in their general structure the features of an extremely 



