ON THE EXTINCT ANIMALS OF THE COLONIES OF GREAT BRITAIN. 269 
have trod the ground like a heavy pachydermal brute. Yet 
there are multiplied proofs in its skeleton that it carried its 
young in a pouch, and that it belonged to the prevalent 
characteristic type of suckling beasts in Australia — that it was, 
in fact, the giant of the Marsupial order. 
In wild nature a balance is maintained between the flesh- 
makers and the flesh-eaters. The teleologist expatiates upon 
the beneficence of the check interposed by Providence upon the 
undue increase of the vegetable feeders through the contempo- 
raneous existence of their devourers. * In Australia, at the 
present period, the wild or native browsers and grazers are in 
excess. 
The native or aboriginal carnivora are now too few and too 
feeble to keep the herds of kangaroos in due check. The largest 
known existing native carnivore in Australia is the so-called 
“ native cat” ( Dasyurus macrurus). 
In the smaller adjacent insular tract of “Van Diemen’s 
Land,” or Tasmania, although there be no kangaroo exceeding 
the Australian rufous kind in size, there are two kinds of in- 
digenous Marsupial carnivora larger and more destructive than 
any known to exist in the more extensive continent. One of 
these is the so-called “ Devil,” the other the native hysena. 
The zoologist substitutes for the colonial vernacular appellatives 
his descriptive Greek compounds. Sarcophilus, or “flesh- 
lover,” designates the mischievous, untamable brute which 
might weigh down a jackal, though of more compact and robust 
build ; Thylacinus, or “ pouched wolf,” or “ hysena,” is the 
name by which the larger striped sheep-worrier is known to 
science. 
Strange that neither of these “ checks ” should exist in the 
wider field, to operate upon the manifold herds of marsupial 
herbivores of the larger continent ! Stranger still if the 
balance or check had never been interposed during the old 
times, when the larger kinds of kangaroo and their huge, even 
gigantic, congeners browsed the scrub or grazed the prairie over 
the length and breadth of the Australian continent. 
The following is the account which the palaeontologist has to 
render on this subject. Mitchell’s gatherings in the breccia 
clefts and hollows of the limestone rocks in Eastern Australia 
included remains of both Sarcophilus and Thylacinus , corre- 
sponding in bulk and specific characters . with the species 
still existing in Tasmania. Considering the size of these 
carnivores, their audacity, the damage which the larger one 
inflicts upon the flocks of the Tasmanian colonist, and the 
stupid pertinacity with which the smaller “devil” devastates 
* Buckland, “ Bridgewater Treatise,” vol. 1. 
