Falling in Love

6. A Fossil Continent

If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be translated

backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into the flourishing woods of

the secondary geological period--say about the precise moment of time

when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck,

on the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean--the

intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet smile of

cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, 'Why, this is

just like Australia.' The animals, the trees, the plants, the insects,

would all more or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind

him in his happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.

The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages for a few million

summers or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound by dates),

and would have landed him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty

much at the exact point whence he first started.

In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter,

Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its

secondary age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk

period or earlier ages. Isolated from all the remainder of the earth

about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and

the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence,

long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on

nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,

long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and

colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their

race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent

found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from

all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon

itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and

animals out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence was

that progress in Australia has been absurdly slow, and that the country

as a whole has fallen most woefully behind the times in all matters

pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows

that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent; its

peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact

that it still remains at very nearly the same early point of development

which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.

"Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, indeed, it is quite

time nowadays that Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been

left out of the running for some four mundane ages or so at a rough

computation.

Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than precept; so

perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall make the

principle I wish to illustrate a trifle clearer to the European

comprehension. In Australia, when Cook or Van Diemen first visited it,

there were no horses, cows, or sheep; no rabbits, weasels, or cats; no

indigenous quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched mammals or

marsupials, familiarly typified to every one of us by the mamma kangaroo

in Regent's Park, who carries the baby kangaroos about with her, neatly

deposited in the sac or pouch which nature has provided for them instead

of a cradle. To this rough generalisation, to be sure, two special

exceptions must needs be made; namely, the noble Australian black-fellow

himself, and the dingo or wild dog whose ancestors no doubt came to the

country in the same ship with him, as the brown rat came to England with

George I. of blessed memory. But of these two solitary representatives

of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we

may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated

Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to

kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial

animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.

Now, who and what are the marsupials as a family, viewed in the dry

light of modern science? Well, they are simply one of the very oldest

mammalian families, and therefore, I need hardly say, in the levelling

and topsy-turvy view of evolutionary biology, the least entitled to

consideration or respect from rational observers. For of course in the

kingdom of science the last shall be first, and the first last; it is

the oldest families that are accounted the worst, while the best

families mean always the newest. Now, the earliest mammals to appear on

earth were creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as the

time when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of Lyme Regis

were laid down on the bed of the muddy sea that once covered the surface

of Dorset and the English Channel, a little creature like the kangaroo

rats of Southern Australia lived among the plains of what is now the

south of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marl

Europe seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefs

and atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted

by numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in

appearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while others

resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellent

imitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil. Up to

the end of the time when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussex

were laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence anywhere

in the world of any mammals differing in type from those which now

inhabit Australia. In other words, so far as regards mammalian life, the

whole of the world had then already reached pretty nearly the same point

of evolution that poor Australia still sticks at.

About the beginning of the tertiary period, however, just after the

chalk was all deposited, and just before the comparatively modern clays

and sandstones of the London basin began to be laid down, an arm of the

sea broke up the connection which once subsisted between Australia and

the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, _vi* Java, Sumatra,

the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. 'But how do you know,' asks the

candid inquirer, 'that such a connection ever existed at all?' Simply

thus, most laudable investigator--because there are large land mammals

in Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim across a broad ocean.

There are none in New Zealand, none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none in

Tahiti, none in Madeira, none in Teneriffe--none, in short, in any

oceanic island which never at any time formed part of a great continent.

How could there be, indeed? The mammals must necessarily have got there

from somewhere; and whenever we find islands like Britain, or Japan, or

Newfoundland, or Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenous

quadrupeds, of the same general type as adjacent continents, we see at

once that the island must formerly have been a mere peninsula, like

Italy or Nova Scotia at the present day. The very fact that Australia

incloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners once

inhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to prove beyond

question that uninterrupted land communication must once have existed

between Australia and those distant continents.

In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace's Line,

from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reaching

zoological importance, separates what is called by science 'the

Australian province' on the southwest from 'the Indo-Malayan province'

to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharply

the plants and animals of the Australian type from those of the common

Indian and Burmese pattern. South of Wallace's Line we now find several

islands, big and small, including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, the

Moluccas, Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whose

precise geographical position on the map must of course be readily

remembered, in this age of school boards and universal examination, by

every pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by minor

straits of much shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarine

bank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same wide Australian

continent, because animals of the Australian type are still found in

every one of them. No Indian or Malayan animal, however, of the larger

sort (other than birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace's

Line. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an ocean barrier

which has subsisted there without alteration ever since the end of the

secondary period. From that time to this, as the evidence shows us,

there has never been any direct land communication between Australia and

any part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division.

Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by surprise for a

moment, under the audacious title of 'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New

Guinea.' The gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London

lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there to

have met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the common

tropical Asiatic pattern--rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards.

Everybody believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists.

Those canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first blush of

it. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must have got there by an

overland route. If there had ever been a land connection between New

Guinea and the Malay region, then, since Australian animals range into

New Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, and we

should find Victoria and New South Wales at the present day peopled by

tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, deer, elephants, and squirrels, like

those which now people Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the

kangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually

form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater Britain beneath

the Southern Cross. Of course, in the end, the mysterious and tremendous

Captain Lawson proved to be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom

imagination had bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name

(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was saved from

reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was banished without appeal from

the soil of Papua.

After the deep belt of open sea was thus established between the bigger

Australian continent and the Malayan region, however, the mammals of the

great mainlands continued to develop on their own account, in accordance

with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider plains of their

own habitats. The competition there was fiercer and more general; the

struggle for life was bloodier and more arduous. Hence, while the

old-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along

their own lines in their own restricted southern world, their

collateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America or elsewhere went

on progressing into far higher, stronger, and better adapted forms--the

great central mammalian fauna. In place of the petty phalangers and

pouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the

larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the

mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct,

and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the

American prairies. The pal******** and the deinoceras, the mastodon and

the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed

to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata. Slowly

the horses grow more horse-like, the shadowy camel begins to camelise

himself, the buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branch

out by tentative steps into still more complicated and more complicated

antlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammalian

type, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the older

marsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the faces

of their more successful competitors; the new carnivores devour them

wholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodents

outwit them in the modernised forests. At last the pouched creatures all

disappear utterly from all the world, save only Australia, with the

solitary exception of a single advanced marsupial family, the familiar

opossum of plantation melodies. And the history of the opossum himself

is so very singular that it almost deserves to receive the polite

attention of a separate paragraph for its own proper elucidation.

For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial class now living

outside Australia; and yet, what is at least equally remarkable, none of

the opossums are found _per contra_ in Australia itself. They are, in

fact, the highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock,

specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce competition

of the higher mammals then being developed on every side of them.

Therefore, being later in point of time than the separation, they could

no more get over to Australia than the elephants and tigers and

rhinoceroses could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race

in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.

In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite of

competition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side with

hog-like creatures not yet perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals,

half horse half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes,

unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding antlers. But in

the succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent,

though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb,

and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence in

many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It is

worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos and other

Australian marsupials are proverbially the very stupidest of mammals,

the opossums, on the contrary, are well known to those accurate

observers of animal psychology, the plantation n*****s, to be the very

cleverest, cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fierce

struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum was

absolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smartness, or

else to be improved off the face of the earth by the keen competition of

the pouchless mammals.

Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, landing for

the first time on the coast of New South Wales, saw an animal with short

front limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of

hopping along the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the

opossums of America were the only pouched mammals known to the European

world in any part of the explored continents. Australia, severed from

all the rest of the earth--_penitus toto orbe divisa_--ever since the

end of the secondary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in the

secondary age so far as its larger life-elements were concerned, and

presented to the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of

what 'the world before the flood' must have looked like. Only it was a

very remote flood; an antediluvian age separated from our own not by

thousands, but by millions, of seasons.

To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needful

qualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is ever

quite correct until you have contradicted in minute detail about

two-thirds of it.

In the first place there are a good many modern elements in the

indigenous population of Australia; but then they are elements of the

stray and casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.

They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, the

flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable

number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by the

wind, or washed by the sea, or carried on the feet or feathers of birds,

from one part of the world to another. In all these various ways, no

doubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia at

different times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect of

its original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of its

plants and trees, Australia must still be considered a very

old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent. The strange

puzzle-monkeys, the quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown

into big willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with

their smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a marvellously

antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general appearance of Australian

woodland. All these types belong by birth to classes long since extinct

in the larger continents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,

which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown till introduced

from Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and undershrubs of ancient

aspect cover the soil, remarkable for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage,

their vertically instead of horizontally flattened leaves, and their

general dead blue-green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation

itself, though it contains a few more modern forms than the animal

world, is still essentially antique in type, a strange survival from the

forgotten flora of the chalk age, the oolite, and even the lias.

Again, to winged animals, such as birds and bats and flying insects, the

ocean forms far less of a barrier than it does to quadrupeds, to

reptiles, and to fresh-water fishes. Hence Australia has, to some

extent, been invaded by later types of birds and other flying creatures,

who live on there side by side with the ancient animals of the secondary

pattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be

comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this

respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated

and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very

oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the

mooruk of New Britain. The extreme term in this exceedingly ancient set

of creature is given us by the wingless bird, the apteryx or kiwi of New

Zealand, whose feathers nearly resemble hair, and whose grotesque

appearance makes it as much a wonder in its own class as the

puzzle-monkey and the casuarina are among forest trees. No feathered

creatures so closely approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite or

the toothed birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian and

New Zealand emus and apteryxes. Again, while many characteristic

Oriental families are quite absent, like the vultures, woodpeckers,

pheasants and bulbuls, the Australian region has many other fairly

ancient birds, found nowhere else on the surface of our modern planet.

Such are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the only

feathered things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them to

be hatched, after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or of

fermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, the

lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian

region. So are the wonderful and ******* bower-birds. Brush-tongued

lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously coloured pigeons, though

somewhat less antique, perhaps, in type, give a special character to the

bird-life of the country. And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the same

old continent, the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the whole

world, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the remote past, some

golden age of Saturnian splendour. Poetry apart, into which I have

dropped for a moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, in

fact, gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in a

rich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and enemies

unknown.

Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have passed over

to Australia at various times by pure chance. They fall into two

classes--the rats and mice, who doubtless got transported across on

floating logs or balks of timber; and the human importations, including

the dog, who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the wreck

and _d****_ of inundations. Yet even in these cases again, Australia

still maintains its proud pre-eminence as the most antiquated and

unprogressive of continents. For the Australian black-fellow must have

got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely

ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the

Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the

woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family,

and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to

modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his

brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when

the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the

continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.

As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the

savage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and

half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and with a

suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once his

uncivilisable tendencies.

Omitting these later importations, however--the modern plants, birds,

and human beings--it may be fairly said that Australia is still in its

secondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached the tertiary

and quaternary periods. Here again, however, a deduction must be made,

in order to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the world

never stands still. Though the Australian animals are still at bottom

the European and Asiatic animals of the secondary age, they are those

animals with a difference. They have undergone an evolution of their

own. It has not been the evolution of the great continents; but it has

been evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, more

restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare the

difference to the difference between the civilisation of Europe and the

civilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out

their indigenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age;

but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave-dwellers or

mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still

zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good

deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special

situations.

The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhynchus and the

echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the 'porcupine ant-eater' of

popular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine living

fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the

mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The

echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; the

ornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed feet, and a great many

quaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds and

reptiles. Both, in fact, are early arrested stages in the development of

mammals from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could only

have struggled on to our own day in a continent free from the severe

competition of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europe

and Asia. Even in Australia itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna have

had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature.

The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousand

minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; the

second is a spiny hedgehog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in

the earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licks

up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the

specialisations brought about by their necessary adaptation to a

particular niche in the economy of life, these two quaint and very

ancient animals probably preserve for us in their general structure the

features of an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor from

whom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally derived.

The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to far less ancient types

than ornithorhynchus and echidna, but they too are very old in

structure, though they have undergone an extraordinary separate

evolution to fit them for the most diverse positions in life. Almost

every main form of higher mammal (except the biggest ones) has, as it

were, its analogue or representative among the marsupial fauna of the

Australasian region fitted to fill the same niche in nature. For

instance, in the blue gum forests of New South Wales a small animal

inhabits the trees, in form and aspect exactly like a flying squirrel.

Nobody who was not a structural and anatomical naturalist would ever for

a moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying squirrels of

the American woodlands. It has just the same general outline, just the

same bushy tail, just the same rough arrangement of colours, and just

the same expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the fore

and hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly because both animals have

independently adapted themselves to the same mode of life under the same

general circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike original

types, but in like conditions, has produced in the end very similar

results in both cases. Still, when we come to examine the more intimate

underlying structure of the two animals, a profound fundamental

difference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a true

squirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal

existence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the

marsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account very

much the same adaptation, for very much the same reasons. Just so a

dolphin looks externally very like a fish, in head and tail and form and

movement; its flippers closely resemble fins; and nothing about it

seems to differ very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or a

codfish. But in reality it has no gills and no swim-bladder; it lays no

eggs; it does not own one truly fish-like organ. It breathes air, it

possesses lungs, it has warm blood, it suckles its young; in heart and

brain and nerves and organisation it is a thorough-going mammal, with an

acquired resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere similarity

in place of residence.

Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may say

that the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits or

marmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and more

or less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful

guinea-pig outline. The vulpine phalanger does duty for a fox; the fat

and sleepy little dormouse phalanger takes the place of a European

dormouse. Both are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of the

larger continents that the colonists always call them, in perfect good

faith, by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koala

poses as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the racoons of America. The

pouched badgers explain themselves at once by their very name, like the

Plyants, the Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of the

Restoration comedy. The 'native rabbit' of Swan River is a rabbit-like

bandicoot; the pouched ant-eater similarly takes the place of the true

ant-eaters of other continents. By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian

devil is a fierce and savage marsupial analogue of the American

wolverine; a smaller species of the same type usurps the name and place

of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figure

precisely like a wolf or a jackal. The pouched weasels are very

weasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats and

mice a close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in this

connection, that the one marsupial family which could compete with

higher American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the monkey

development of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, which

make their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by which

they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal

omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and

roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent,

tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.

Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than any of these, a

living fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly immemorial

and primitive antiquity. The story of its discovery teems with the

strangest romance of natural history. To those who could appreciate the

facts of the case it was just as curious and just as interesting as

though we were now to discover somewhere in an unknown island or an

African oasis some surviving mammoth, some belated megatherium, or some

gigantic and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals of

the Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in a

tropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight and

astonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first 'swam

into their ken' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size and

shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting quietly in our

midst, is comparatively insignificant beside the 'dragons of the prime'

immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the true

enthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel

and a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he had

suddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet of

lizard-like tail in a train behind him. And this is the plain story of

that marvellous discovery of a 'missing link' in our own pedigree.

In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur in

abundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ceratodi.

(I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teeth

reappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at last

slowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturally

concluded that the creature to which they belonged had died out also,

and was long since numbered with the dodo and the mastodon. The idea

that a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed an

important link in the development of all the higher animals, could never

for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a

pal******* man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or to

discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircled

summit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modern

estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the breath of scientific

Europe by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimming

about as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintest

consciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland

at the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as

barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with

irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination,

however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting link of

primary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest

air-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true

fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging

expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it

browses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise behaves itself in a

manner wholly unbecoming its piscine antecedents and aquatic education.

To fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has both

lungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at will, or, if it

chooses, the two together. Though covered with scales, and most

fish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance both

to salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the North

American mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the

other, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher

animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine

ancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living

fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the

fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been

beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;

in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last

relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.