98 A NATURALIST IN TASMANIA ch. 



I witnessed a Devil being treated in this undignified 

 way, the animal trying to turn its neck round to get 

 at its captor, and uttering a furious hissing noise 

 with wide open mouth, displaying its powerful teeth. 



It is remarkable that these two carnivorous 

 Marsupials should be confined to Tasmania : 

 their bones in a recent fossil condition have been 

 found in New South Wales and Victoria, so that 

 its range was formerly much wider than now. It 

 is supposed that the advent of the Dingo in Aus- 

 tralia, which probably came over with the conquer- 

 ing Australian blacks from Malaysia, exterminated 

 the reign of the Tiger and Devil on the mainland, 

 but owing to the existence of Bass's Straits neither 

 the Dingo nor the Australian blacks ever got into 

 Tasmania, so that the Tiger and Devil on the one 

 hand and the Tasmanian aboriginals on the other 

 were able to survive. 



We reached Lake St. Clair at noon the following 

 day, after experiencing even greater difficulties with 

 the track, which became worse and worse and 

 more encumbered with fallen timber as we ap- 

 proached the lake. About three miles from the 

 lake we crossed over the Derwent Hiver, which 

 rises in Lake St. Clair and is even here a fine broad 

 stream of absolutely limpid ice-cold water. In 

 our progress from the Great Lake we crossed over 

 five rivers, rising on the plateau and all draining 

 south into the Derwent River, namely, the Ouse, 

 the Little Pine River, the Nive, Clarence, and finally 

 the Derwent at its source. All these are rivers 

 of considerable size running in beds of greenstone 



