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PREFACE. 



The volume which Mr. Lydekker has written will, I believe, 

 be found to be very useful to the student of Mammalia. 

 The volumes of Gould's " Mammals of Australia " are both 

 rare and costly, and the object of the " Naturalist's Library " 

 is to give, within a handy compass, a scientific, and yet 

 popular, account of the Australian Mammals. For the scien- 

 tist, Mr. Oldfield Thomas's " Catalogue of the Marsupialia and 

 Monotremata in the collection of the British Museum " is 

 the indispensable compendium of our knowledge of these two 

 Orders up to the year 1888. During the six years which have 

 since elapsed, a few new species have been described, and 

 these have been added in the present work by Mr. Lydekker, 

 whose notes on ihe fossil species, on which he is one of the 

 first authorities, lend an additional interest to the volume. 



Especial care has been bestowed upon the plates. Those 

 originally published in " Jardine's Naturalist's Library " were 

 very well executed, and in the present issue the whole of 

 the animals figured have been re-coloured from actual speci- 

 mens in the British Museum, while figures of some of the 



