PREFACE. 



A feelixg of good will to the Colony, such as influences all, from the highest adminis- 

 trator to the humblest labourer, who are able and desirous to cooperate with our 

 distant countrymen, has animated me throughout my endeavours to obtain and 

 interpret the evidences of ancient mammalian life in Australia. 



A 'Natural History' of that noble continent must result from its occupancy by a 

 high and intellectual race of men. The more needful works, the rough conquests of 

 primitive wilds, necessarily absorb the time and energies of the first generation of 

 settlers. Their successors and their children, inheritors of the wealth created by their 

 forefathers and forerunners, will improve and embellish the first peaceful conquests. 

 After the body the needs of the intellect stimulate the acquisition of the essential 

 conditions of a scientific knowledge of the new territory. 



The generations issuing from colonial schools, colleges, universities, look abroad 

 upon an environing nature, so new and strange to their forefathers, with an irresistible 

 impulse to interpret it. Some of its aspects need more aids to their right compre- 

 hension than others ; and it is to the strange and difficult task of restoring past phases 

 of the mammalian life that I am encouraged to think the present work may be found 

 helpful. 



The great Master whose methods of restoration have been my guide, thought, and in 

 his day not unnaturally, that few species of large quadrupeds remained to be discovered 

 in the fossil state. " II y a peu d'esperance de decouvrir de nouvelles especes de grands 

 quadrupedes "*. 



llich and unlooked for, however, as were the additions to the mammalian class made 

 known in his immortal Work, they were but the beginnings or samples of that harvest 

 which he has taught his successors to garner in. 



Nevertheless, in bringing to a close the researches on the Fossil Mammals of Aus- 

 tralia, which have occupied part of my annual labours since 1836 f, and taking a 

 retrospect of their results, I sometimes indulged in the flattering thought that the 

 chances were small of future discoveries of new species of large extinct marsupial 

 quadrupeds in the Australian continent. 



Warned, however, by the rate of progress of the science of palaeontology since the 



* Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, 4to, 1821, vol. i. p. xxx. 



t Appendix to ' Mitchell's Three Expeditious into the Interior of Australia,' 8vo. 



