KANaAEOOS. 467 



covered and explored, scientific men of all countries have had a 

 puzzling problem to account for the peculiar type of animal and 

 vegetable life of whicli Australia is the home, and to assign a 

 reason why kangaroos should now be confined in their habitation 

 to this one region of the world. The evidence furnished by the 

 fossils that have been procured in places very widely separated, tends 

 to show that these animals, or ones of a kindred type, were distri- 

 buted during the ages known to geologists as the Oolite and Triassic 

 periods, over a very extensive range of the earth's surface as it 

 then existed. 



The marsupials are quadrupeds of a lower order than most of 

 the existing mammals, and another fact scientists say they have 

 gleaned from the discovery of their remains is that they 

 were among the first animals created, for they are found in 

 the terrestrial formations, made long before those animals now 

 recognized as of a superior order were in existence. Conse- 

 quently dogs, horses, oxen, cats, and the brute creation now 

 famihar to us, or in other words the higher class of animals, being 

 a later growth or the creation of succeeding ages, the kangaroos, 

 which are among the latest discovered animals by man, yet are 

 the direct descendants of the oldest family of quadrupeds that 

 were brought into existence. 



The GREAT KANGAROO {MacTopii^s major) is the name given to the 

 species which was first seen by Captain Cook's party, and it was 

 so called when it was ascertained that it was the largest of all 

 the existing varieties of the Macropodidce. 



However, this was not always the case, if we are to believe 

 those professors who, upon the scanty material of a jawbone or 

 a tooth, can reconstruct in their mind's eye the animal who 

 owned it, and sitting down write off a lengthy treatise upon the 

 peculiarities of its formation and habits, after informing the 

 world to begin with, that the animal has been dead some thousands 

 of years, or perhaps that its species ceased to exist ages before 

 the first man was created. 



Relics of a beast that, according to these professors, was 

 closely allied to the k-angaroo, have been found in the tertiary 

 deposits of Australia, which they state must have been of gigantic 



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