90 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 



special exceptions must needs be made ; namely, the noble 

 Australian black-fellow himself, and the dingo or wild dog 

 whose ancestors no doubt came to the country in the same 

 ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with 

 George I. of blessed memory. But of these two solitary 

 representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna ' more 

 anon ' ; for the present we may regard it as approximately 

 true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the 

 lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to 

 kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint 

 marsupial animals, with names as strange and clumsy as 

 their forms. 



Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, 

 viewed in the dry light of modern science ? Well, they 

 are simply one of the very oldest mammalian families, and 

 therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling and topsy- 

 turvy view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to 

 consideration or respect from rational observers. For of 

 course in the kingdom of science the last shall be first, and 

 the first last ; it is the oldest families that are accounted 

 the worst, while the best families mean always the newest. 

 Now, the earliest mammals to appear on earth were 

 creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the 

 time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of 

 Lyme Eegis were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea 

 that once covered the surface of Dorset and the English 

 Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo rats of Southern 

 Australia lived among the plains of what is now the south 

 of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the 

 red marl Europe seems to have been broken up into an 

 archipelago of coral reefs and atolls ; and the islands of 

 this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted by numbers of tiny 

 ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in appear- 

 ance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while 



