A FOSSIL CONTINENT 99 



the most antiquated and unprogressive of continents. 

 For the Australian black-fellow must have got there a very 

 long time ago indeed ; he belongs to an extremely ancient 

 human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull 

 the Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races ; 

 while the woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally 

 distinct human family, and perhaps the very lowest sample 

 of humanity that has survived to modern times, must have 

 crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his brethren on 

 the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on 

 when the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast 

 ashore upon the continent inhabited by the yet more 

 barbaric and helpless negrito race. As for the dingo, or 

 Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the savage 

 natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf 

 and half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and 

 with a suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once 

 his uncivilisable tendencies. 



Omitting these later importations, however the modern 

 plants, birds, and human beings it may be fairly said that 

 Australia is still in its secondary stage, while the rest of 

 the world has reached the tertiary and quaternary periods. 

 Here again, however, a deduction must be made, in order 

 to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the 

 world never stands still. Though the Australian animals 

 are still at bottom the European and Asiatic animals of the 

 secondary age, they are those animals with a difference. 

 They have undergone an evolution of their own. It has 

 not been the evolution of the great continents ; but it has 

 been evolution all the same ; slower, more local, narrower, 

 more restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One 

 might compare the difference to the difference between 

 the civilisation of Europe and the civilisation of Mexico or 

 Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out their in- 



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