t 



A FOSSIL CONTINENT 103 



particular. And it is worth notice, in this connection, that 

 the one marsupial family which could compete with higher 

 American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the 

 monkey development of the marsupial race. They have 

 opposable thumbs, whicli make their feet almost into hands ; 

 tliey have prehensile tails, by which they hang from 

 branches in true monkey fashion ; they lead an arboreax 

 omnivorous existence ; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, 

 insects, and roots ; and altogether they are just active, 

 cunnmg, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-mon- 

 keys, 



Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than 

 any of these, a living fossil of the very oldest sort, a 

 creature of wholly immemorial and primitive antiquity. 

 The story of its discovery teems with the strangest ro- 

 mance of natural history. To those who could appre- 

 ciate the facts of the case it was just as curious and just as 

 interesting as though we were now to discover somewliere 

 in an unknown island or an African oasis some surviving 

 mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some gigantic 

 and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct 

 animals of the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing 

 to our dazzled eyes in a tropical ramble, and you can 

 faintly conceive the delight and astonishment of natural- 

 ists at large when the barramunda first ' swam into their 

 ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size 

 and shape this ' extinct fish,' still living and grunting 

 quietly in our midst, is comparatively insignificant beside 

 the ' dragons of the prime ' immortalised in a famous stanza 

 by Tennyson : but, to the true enthusiast, size is nothing ; 

 and the barramunda is just as much a marvel and a mon- 

 ster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he 

 had suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging 

 fifty feet of lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And 



