176 MAMMALIAN DESCENT. [Lbct. VII. 



to a flying Phalanger — a Marsupial ; for, as shown 

 in the woodcut, there is a very marked rudiment (so it 

 appears to me) of the pouch to be seen in the embryo. I 

 do not, indeed, find it very much like the existing flying 

 Marsupial (Petaurus), but we have only odds and ends 

 of the old Metatherian group left alive, and I fancy that 

 this is an old flying Phalanger, that has just flitted, one 

 may say, into the Eutherian territory. Yet the Bats 

 certainly might claim relationship to him, as a sort 

 of arrested forefather, so that it may be said of Nature 

 that she tried her 'prentice hand on the Colugo, and then, 

 afterwards, she made the Bats. 



Nature must have broken up all her old types of Bats, 

 and buried them ; just forgetting to get rid of the very 

 first, and poorest, of these — the Colugo. If this be the 

 truth of the case, we have in this beast a scarcely 

 modified, early Tertiary Bat ; not a Bat in the modern 

 zoological sense, but an Insectivore with the very rags 

 and tatters of the Marsupial upon him, striving to make 

 to himself wings, that he may scorn the earth. Instead 

 of going into details with regard to the anatomy of this 

 type, I wiU just mention two or three things in its 

 structure that mark it out as one of the most unique 

 and lonely forms in existence. Yet zoologists have 

 not been so bold in this case as in that of the Hyrax, 

 which is made to stand now as the head of the family 

 Hyracoidea. 



The feeling is that you cannot make a faggot of 



