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ALMOST HUMAN 
SOME QUEER AUSTRALIAN ANIMALS 
THE PLATYPUS. 
We have several very quaint and interesting animals of our own in 
Australia, and the very queerest creature existing to-day in the animal 
world, the platypus, belongs entirely to us. When Mark Twain visited 
Australia he believed everything he heard from us, or of us, until he 
was told of the platypus. He then wrote his delicious account of the 
“Ornitho-rhyncus dear.” He had reason to be sceptical, for it is, like 
Nature’s Riddle. 
the gnu, made up of odds and ends of other creatures, and the resultant 
patch-work is most extraordinary. No one can really decide whether 
it is rightly classified as an animal, a bird, or a reptile, for it has some 
of the characteristics of all three. It is amphibious; it swims; it 
burrows; it hibernates; it lays eggs, and yet, like the higher animals, it 
suckles its young when hatched. It has a long, bushy tail like a beaver, 
it has strong, webbed feet that resemble both a duck's and a lizard’s in 
