96 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 



the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the opossums 

 of America were the only pouched mammals known to the 

 European world in any part of the explored continents. 

 Australia, severed from all the rest of the earth penitus 

 toto orbe divisa ever since the end of the secondary period, 

 remained as yet, so to speak, in the secondary age so far as 

 its larger life-elements were concerned, and presented to 

 the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of 

 what ' the world before the flood ' must have looked like. 

 Only it was a very remote flood ; an antediluvian age 

 separated from our own not by thousands, but by millions, 

 of seasons. 



To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry 

 needful qualifications must be made at the very outset. 

 No statement is ever quite correct until you have contra- 

 dicted in minute detail about two-thirds of it. 



In the first place there are a good many modern 

 elements in the indigenous population of Australia ; but 

 then they are elements of the stray and casual sort one 

 always finds even in remote oceanic islands. They are 

 waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, 

 the flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a 

 considerable number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns 

 always get blown by the wind, or washed by the sea, or 

 carried on the feet or feathers of birds, from one part of the 

 world to another. In all these various ways, no doubt, mo- 

 dern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia 

 at different times, and altered to some extent the character 

 and aspect of its original native vegetation. Neverthe- 

 less, even in the matter of its plants and trees, Australia 

 must still be considered a very old-fashioned and stick-in 

 the-mud continent. The strange puzzle-monkeys, the 

 quaint -jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown into big 

 willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with 



