A FOSSIL CONTINENT 91 



others resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or 

 turned into excellent imitation carnivores, like our modern 

 friend the Tasmanian devil. Up to the end of the tune 

 when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex were 

 laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence 

 anywhere in the world of any mammals differing in type 

 from those which now inhabit Australia. In other words, 

 so far as regards mammalian life, the whole of the world 

 had then already reached pretty nearly the same point of 

 evolution that poor Australia still sticks at. 



About the beginning of the tertiary period, however, 

 just after the chalk was all deposited, and just before the 

 comparatively modern clays and sandstones of the London 

 basin began to be laid down, an arm of the sea broke up 

 the connection which once subsisted between Australia and 

 the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, via Java, 

 Sumatra, the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. ' But 

 how do you know,' asks the candid inquirer, ' that such a 

 connection ever existed at all ? ' Simply thus, most laud- 

 able investigator because there are large land mammals 

 in Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim 

 across a broad ocean. There are none in New Zealand, 

 none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none in Tahiti, none in 

 Madeira, none in Teneriffe none, in short, in any oceanic 

 island which never at any time formed part of a great con- 

 tinent. How could there be, indeed ? The mammals must 

 necessarily have got there from somewhere ; and whenever 

 we find islands like Britain, or Japan, or Newfoundland, or 

 Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenous quadru- 

 peds, of the same general type as adjacent continents, we 

 see at once that the island must formerly have been a mere 

 peninsula, like Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day. 

 The very fact that Australia incloses a large group of 

 biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once inhabited Europe 



