A FOSSIL CONTINENT 95 



highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock, 

 specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce 

 competition of the higher mammals then being developed 

 on every side of them. Therefore, being later in point of 

 time than the separation, they could no more get over to 

 Australia than the elephants and tigers and rhinoceroses 

 could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race 

 in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mam- 

 malian cousins. In Europe and Asia the opossums lived 

 on lustily, in spite of competition, during the whole of the 

 Eocene period, side by side with hog-like creatures not yet 

 perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals, half horse half 

 tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes, 

 unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding 

 antlers. But in the succeeding age they seem to disappear 

 from the eastern continent, though in the western, thanks 

 to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb, and tree-haunting 

 life, they still drag out a precarious existence in many forms 

 from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It 

 is worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos 

 and other Australian marsupials are proverbially the very 

 stupidest of mammals, the opossums, on the contrary, are 

 well known to those accurate observers of animal psycho- 

 logy, the plantation negroes, to be the very cleverest, 

 cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the 

 fierce struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, 

 the opossum was absolutely forced to acquire a certain 

 amount of Yankee smartness, or else to be improved off the 

 face of the earth by the keen competition of the pouchless 

 mammals. 



Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph 

 Banks, landing for the first time on the coast of New South 

 Wales, saw an animal with short front limbs, huge hind 

 legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of hopping along 



