NOTE-BOOK OF A NATUKALIST. 165 



Zoological Society in the Regent's Park. They had been 

 presented to the Society by Mr. Gunn. I had, on a 

 former day, seen them imperfectly by getting into the 

 outer apartment of their den and lookiag into their dor- 

 mitory. When fairly exposed, they presented to my eye 

 the images of the most extraordinary animals that I had 

 seen; creatures, I repeat, such as one has beheld in 

 dreams — uncouth, loggerheaded, oddly made up, as if 

 Nature had been trying her ' 'prentice han' ' at wolf- 

 making, and as if they belonged to a very ancient state 

 of things in this planet, as all the native Australian 

 quadrupeds look. The clumsy, ill-defined forms of these 

 thylacines have puzzled men to give them a name. 

 ' Wolves,' ' hyaenas,' are some of the aj^pellations applied 

 to them by the colonists, who saw a dog-like or wolf-like 

 head on a body striped with marks resembling, in a 

 degree, those of some of the hyeenas. It is impossible 

 for a paleeontologist to look at them, without fancying 

 that he sees some fossil animal recalled to life ; and, 

 indeed, the extinct zoophagous marsu-pial ThylacotJierium 

 must, as its name implies, have borne some resemblance 

 to the animals now under consideration. There cannot 

 have been any very wide zoological interval between the 

 forms of the thylacine and of tlie thylacothere. 



The thylacines, like all the true Australian mammals, 

 are strictly marsupial ; and the female rejoices in as good 

 a pouch after her kind as the best-provided kanguroo of 

 them all. 



And what a beautiful provision this is ; how admirably 

 adaj)ted to the region in which the marsupials live, and 

 move, and have their being. Australia is proverbially 

 wanting in rivers, and during a considerable portion of 

 the year the supply of water is very precarious. Most of 

 these quadrupeds drink very little ; and the mother, in- 



Macropus major. 



