88 A FOSSIL CONTINENT 



' A FOSSIL CONTINENT 



If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be 

 translated backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into 

 the flourishing woods of the secondary geological period — 

 say about the precise moment of time when the English 

 chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck, on 

 the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean — the 

 intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet 

 smile of cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some 

 surprise, ' Why, this is just like Australia.' The animals, 

 the trees, the plants, the insects, would all more or less 

 vi\ddly remind him of those he had left behind him in his 

 happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages 

 for a few million summers or so, indefinitely (in geology 

 we refuse to be bound by dates), and would have landed 

 him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty much at 

 the exact point whence he first started. 



In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be 

 made hereafter, Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, 

 a country still in its secondary age, a surviving iragment 

 of the primitive world of the chalk period or earlier ages. 

 Isolated from all the remainder of the earth about the be- 

 ginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mannnoth 

 and the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the 

 stage of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor 

 of the horse had turned tail on nature's rough draft of the 



