vi 



demise of its Founder, in 1832, I deem it more probable that a like lapse of time after 

 the issue of the present volume will have Ween attended by such rich results to the young 

 and anient naturalists of Australia as to show that their predecessor at home had but 

 "skimmed the cream," and given them the broad outlines of a picture of ancient 

 animated nature, which their labours will fill in and finish. 



CuviBB, at the close of his brilliant demonstration of the fossil Opossum in the 

 Eocene quarries at Montmartre, remarks: — " Le Tapir est jusqu'ici le seul genre 

 americairj que nous ayons trouve fossile en Europe: le Sarigue seroit le second. Quant 

 aus genres propres a L'Australasie, on n'en avoit jamais decouvert parmi les fossiles 

 d'Europe"*. It needed, in fact, to go far below the tertiary beds to find the mam- 

 malian fossils most allied to those of Australia. 



The teeth representing the Rhaetic Microlestes find their nearest resemblance in the 

 disproportionately small hind molars of Thylacoleo. The Plagiaulax of the Purbeck 

 beds pushes the correspondence to the shape and disproportionately large size of the 

 incisors and sectorials; and the foremost large laniariform teeth are reduced to a pair 

 in both the pleistocene paucidentate Carnivore of Australia and its smaller British 

 predecessor from the Upper Oolite. 



The multidentate marsupial Ferines from near the Lower Oolitef (Amphit/ierium, 

 Amphilestes, e. g.) are represented by the rare and singular, still existing, Australian 

 genus Myrmec6bms$. The mandible and mandibular dentition of the typodentate car- 

 nivore Phascolotherium, a British extinct genus of like antiquity, find their characters 

 more nearly repeated in Thylacinus and Sarcophilus than in any ex-Australian genera. 

 The existing and extinct pleistocene Mammals manifesting affinity to British mesozoic 

 forms have not been met with elsewhere than in Australasia. 



The existing Didelphids of North and South America have their nearest of kin, 

 amonii extinct Marsupials, in the Didelphys gypsorum, Cuvier, from the eocene tertiary 

 deposits of Montmartre. No Marsupial so closely allied to a true Didelphys has been 

 met with in mesozoic strata — whence it would seem that the deeper we delve in quest 

 of remains of extinct mammals the further afield must we go to find their analogues. 

 If we bring a buried Marsupial to light from British or European Tertiaries, we may 

 find its representative in Maryland. When we reach the Purbeck shales, the Stones- 

 held slates, and Rhaetic deposits of the British Island, we have to travel to the antipodes 

 to obtain their existing analogues. 



More than thirty years ago I summed up the evidences of actual Australian forms 

 of life which recall the characters of the extinct forms revealed by fossils from our 

 mesozoic strata. 



" Not only Trigonue but Terebratulce exist, and the latter abundantly, in the Aus- 

 tralian seas, yielding food to the ' Port-Jackson Shark ' (Cestracion), as their extinct 

 molluscous analogues did to the similarly extinct allied cartilaginous fishes called 



* Op. cit. vol. iii. p. 292. t Sec the Tabular View of Strata, p. 4. 



J British Fossil Mammals, 8vo, 1846, p. 53, figs. 18, 19. 



