6. A Fossil Continent - Page 2

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