466 WILD ANIMALS. 



This is the earliest notice recorded of this animal by an 

 Englishman, but a Dutch traveller, Cornelius de Bruins or Bruns, 

 as early as the year 1711 described the first kangaroo of which 

 scientists had ever heard. He saw in a garden at Batavia some 

 specimens of these extraordinary creatures that were kept in 

 captivity there. They were subsequently identified as a species of 

 Marsupiata, inhabiting New Guinea. De Bruins called the animal 

 Filander, but naturalists have named it after the Dutchman him- 

 self, and call it " Macropus Brunii." 



Pallas in 1777, and Schreber in 1778, both described this 

 species, which resulted in public attention being drawn to this 

 entirely new order of mammals, and as a consequence their 

 natural history soon became better known. 



Although it was left to Captain Cook to give the first description 

 of a kangaroo to Englishmen, yet it is not improbable that the 

 earlier explorers in the southern seas were in reality the first to 

 see these animals, but failed to record the fact from its being such 

 a trifling incident to men who had so many other wonderful things 

 to narrate. Dampier, the celebrated buccaneer and adventurous 

 navigator, stated that on the 12th August, 1699, being on the 

 western coast of Australia, two or three of his seamen " saw 

 creatures not unlike wolves, but so lean that they looked like 

 mere skeletons." From this meagre description it is not possible 

 to accurately identify the animals they did see, but they were 

 probably kangaroos. 



The curious group of animals now known as the family of 

 Marsupiata,^ or pouched animals, of which the kangaroo forms the 

 sub-genus Macropus, a word meaning long-footed, are exclusively 

 confined in their habitat to the Austrahan continent, and a few 

 of the islands immediately adjoining, with the single exception of 

 the opossum family which occur in America. In New Zealand, 

 however, strange to say the family of marsupials is not re- 

 presented, nor, as far as can be learnt, has it ever been, for 

 some of their fossihzed bones would have been found ere this. 



Since the kangaroo, or rather the land it lives in, was dis- 



2 From marsupium, a purse or bag ; alluding to the peculiar pouch with which 

 the female marsupial animals are furnished. 



