THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 



research and philosophic interpretation of the facts revealed, this insular territory 

 would appear to represent the isolated fragment of a pre-existing, apparently 

 Mesozoic, Antarctic Continent of such vast extent as to have united with its own 

 land area the now remotely separated regions of South Africa, South America, 

 and New Zealand. 



The evidence in support of this interpretation, for which science is mainly 

 indebted to the writings and investigations of Huxley, Charles Darwin, A. E. 

 Wallace, W. K. Parker, H. F. Blandford, and H. O. Forbes is accumulating con- 

 tinually, and rendering more logically demonstrable the fact that there once existed 

 two huge northern and' southern continents, for which Prof. Huxley proposed the 

 felicitous titles of " Arctogea " and " Notogea " respectively. 



As an integral portion of the primitive antarctic continent, or Notogea, 

 Australia, by its apparent earlier isolation from the continental mass, would appear to 

 have preserved alive and in its pristine purity much of that faunal and floral individ- 

 uality which in other regions of the world was early brought into competition with, 

 and succumbed to, those hardier and more aggressive northern races, that, following 

 the newer land distribution, migrated southward from Arctogea. Had such changes 

 of the apparent previous distribution , of the larger land areas of the earth's 

 surface resulted in bringing about the continuity of the Indo- Malay peninsula with 

 Australia, subsequent to the population of the first-named region with a carnivorous 

 mammalian fauna corresponding with, or allied to, that which now inhabits it, it 

 may be safely predicted that but little of the most interesting marsupial and 

 other archaic types of animal life would be now surviving in this Island-Continent. 

 Happily, in the interests of science, and for the intellectual appreciation of all those 

 with whom natural history and the unravelling of nature's mysteries is a continual 

 feast, this catastrophe was averted. 



A number of living witnesses may be summoned to give evidence in support 

 of the widely entertained speculations concerning the pre-existence of an extensive 

 antarctic continent wherein the present widely separated lands of Australia, New 

 Zealand, South Africa, and South America were either incorporated or most closely 

 approximated. These witnesses, moreover, are not represented so extensively by that 

 very characteristic Australian group of the marsupial mammalia as by isolated members 

 of various other animal and vegetable types. Up to within the last few months, in 

 point of fact, no marsupial closely related to the several families and many species of 

 this order peculiar to Australia was known to be living in any other part of the 



