president's address. 1 1 



her existing Mammalia but with no placentals, had been cut off 

 from the rest of the world, the aboriginals had arrived with their 

 dogs and driven off the old race, before they had been able to 

 obtain any of these dogs from the last comers. If some such 

 thing as this had not happened, and the Dingo had been 

 indigenous, it is difficult to understand why it had not crossed to 

 Tasmania. 



If there is anything in these suppositions, man must have been 

 in Australia while her now extinct volcanoes were active, and 

 while her great fossil beasts were still in the flesh, but it is right 

 to say that there is no proof of this, although carefully searched 

 for. 



I have taken little account of the bats and small rodents, as 

 the former could easily have flown across from New Guinea or 

 elsewhere, and the latter might as easily have been introduced by 

 the new comers in their canoes, or have floated over on drift 

 wood and rubbish. 



It is well known that all Australian mammals, with the 

 exceptions mentioned, but including many which being now 

 extinct are only known by their fossil remains, fall within the 

 order Marsupialia. 



A few examples of this order have been discoverer! in America, 

 the Malay Archipelago, Celebes, Amboyna, Banda, and Timor, 

 but Australia, including Tasmania and New Guinea, is their 

 stronghold, and has been characterised as their metropolis. A 

 great number of Australian marsupial families are found nowhere 

 outside this region. The brains of these creatures prove them to 

 be of a very low order in the scale of animal life, and it is 

 supposed that they everywhere preceded the placental mammals, 

 none of which are known to have existed before the Tertiary era, 

 although the Cretaceous rocks of North America and the under- 

 lying Jurassic or Oolitic rocks, both of that continent and of 

 Europe, shew that marsupials, allied to the primitive carnivorous 

 types now inhabiting Australia, were once widely spread over 

 Europe ; and the remains of like animals have now been 

 discovered in Patagonia. As these marsupials were quite 



