A FOSSIL CONTINENT 9:> 



lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, 

 and there to have met with marvellous escapes from terrible 

 beasts of the common tropical Asiatic pattern — rhinoceroses, 

 tigers, monkeys, and leopards, l^verybody believed the 

 new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists. Thoso 

 canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first 

 blush of it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must 

 haVe got tliere by an overland route. If there had ever 

 been a land connection between New Guinea and the ^lalay 

 region, then, since Australian animals range into New 

 Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, 

 and v.'e should find Victoria and New South Wales at the 

 present day peopled by tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, 

 deer, elephants, and squirrels, like those which now people 

 Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the kangaroos, 

 wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually 

 form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater 

 Britain beneath the Southern Cross. Of course, in the end, 

 the mysterious and tremendous Captain Lawson proved to 

 be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom imagination had 

 bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name 

 (not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was 

 saved from reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was 

 banished without appeal from the soil of Papua. 



After the deep belt of open sea was thus established 

 between the bigger Australian continent and the Malayan 

 region, however, the mammals of the great mainlands 

 continued to develop on their own account, in accordance 

 with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider 

 plains of their own habitats. The competition there was 

 fiercer and more general ; the struggle for life was bloodier 

 and more arduous. Hence, while the old-fashioned mar- 

 supials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along 

 their own lines in their own restricted southern world. 



