74 THE ORIGIN OF AUSTRALIA 
there is a way out, without assuming what the facts deny : 
surely the facts themselves are fertile in suggestion. 
66. Certain other points about our marsupials must 
be cleared up. First: they are said to be the lowest type 
of mammal: then because the earliest known mammals 
are (thought) to be marsupials, they are claimed as ancestors 
of the Australian types. Neither of these deductions has 
much more evidence in its favour than the gratuitous one 
that species are parlous slow in achieving stability. 
67. The term “low” as applied to specific form, is 
fraught with dire risk of misrepresentation. Take the 
“highest? lving mammal—dog, horse, monkey, what 
you will—and deliberately consider whether it is better 
adapted to its environment, displays finer mental or physical 
powers, than our Marsupials. On this view the term is 
simply nonsensical—the ways of no marsupial have ever 
originated such an adjective as “‘ sheepish” or “ piggish,” 
and no one ever thinks of calling a fool a wallaby instead 
of an ass—and yet these, forsooth, be all higher types than 
anything we can show! It is not in physical or mental 
fitness that marsupials fall short. 
68. But, says the systematist, it is in the mode of 
development that the marsupial comes short. Does it. 
Long ago, Sir R. Owen saw light in this darkness. He 
realised that in a land which was liable to periodic droughts, 
any mammal that brought forth its young, and cradled 
them in helplessness, would die out in the first long dry spell. 
The mother could not visit thé distant water-holes and 
leave her helpless young behind. So, though Sir Richard 
had not the hardihood to put it so broadly, the mother kept 
her babies of portable size, built a pannier, and took the 
family about with her. Owen was laughed at: his shade 
may now begin to smile. Why, every bushman turns 
marsupial—only his pouch is his water-bag: being a man 
he is not so dependent upon the water-hole: he carries 
his water with him in his artificial marsupium. 
69. The marsupial condition is eminently the best for 
the present Australian conditions—just as certainly as that it 
would not have been the best in the palmy days of the Opal 
Sea. Why should not our mammals have invented, or re- 
invented it ? I don’t pronounce one way or the other : either 
