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 primitive6 world of the chalk period or earlier ages. Isolated7 from all the remainder of the earth about the beginning of the tertiary epoch8, long before the mammoth10 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 elks11 and colossal12 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 entirely13 from all social intercourse14 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 pertaining15 to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar16 and original continent; its peculiarity17, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact that it still remains18 at very nearly the same early point of development which Europe had attained20 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 mundane21 ages or so at a rough computation.
Example, says the wisdom of our ancestors, is better than precept22; so perhaps, if I take a single example to start with, I shall make the principle I wish to illustrate23 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 indigenous24 quadrupeds of any sort except the pouched26 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, neatly28 deposited in the sac or pouch25 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 solitary29 representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna30 'more anon'; for the present we may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal31 and unsophisticated Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats32, and other quaint33 marsupial27 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 evolutionary34 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 deposition35 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 subsisted37 between Australia and the rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, via Java, Sumatra, the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. 'But how do you know,' asks the candid38 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 formerly39 have been a mere40 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 naturalist41 who first pointed42 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 geographical43 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 minor44 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 alteration46 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 hoax47 took the world by surprise for a moment, under the audacious title of 'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New Guinea.' The gallant48 captain, or his unknown creator in some London lodging49, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there to have met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the common tropical Asiatic pattern—rhinoceroses51, tigers, monkeys, and leopards53. Everybody believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists54. Those canny55 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 bestowed56 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 intrusive57 rhinoceros52 was banished58 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 bloodier59 and more arduous60. Hence, while the old-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along their own lines in their own restricted southern world, their collateral61 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 strata62 in the larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the mammalian race into monstrous63 creatures, some of them now quite extinct, and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the American prairies. The pal64?otherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes65 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 buffaloes66 acquire the rudiments67 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 devour69 them wholesale70, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodents71 outwit them in the modernised forests. At last the pouched creatures all disappear utterly73 from all the world, save only Australia, with the solitary exception of a single advanced marsupial family, the familiar opossum of plantation74 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 elucidation75.
For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial class now living outside Australia; and yet, what is at least equally remarkable76, 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, specially77 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 perfectly78 piggish, with nondescript animals, half horse half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes, unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment68 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 precarious79 existence in many forms from Virginia to Chili80, 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 psychology81, the plantation negroes, 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 hind4 legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of hopping82 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, severed83 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 antediluvian84 age separated from our own not by thousands, but by millions, of seasons.
To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry85 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 wafted86 by accident from other places. For example, the flora87 is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable number of seeds and fruits and spores88 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 antiquated89 and unfamiliar90 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 foliage91, their vertically92 instead of horizontally flattened93 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 essentially94 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 reptiles95, 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 grotesque96 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 mound97 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 fermenting98 vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honeysuckers, the lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian region. So are the wonderful and ?sthetic 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 balks99 of timber; and the human importations, including the dog, who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the wreck100 and débris 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 jaws101 and skull102 the Neanderthal savage103 and other early prehistoric104 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 exterminated105 later on when the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore106 upon the continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race. As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated107 by the savage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and half jackal, incapable108 of the higher canine109 traits, and with a suspicious, ferocious110, 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 deduction111 must be made, in order to attain19 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 civilisation112 of Europe and the civilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted113 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 'porcupine114 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 lizards115 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 peculiarities116 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 hierarchy117 of nature. The first is a burrowing118 and aquatic119 creature, specialised in a thousand minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean120 habits; the second is a spiny121 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 niche122 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 derived123.
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 analogue124 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 structural125 and anatomical naturalist would ever for a moment dream of doubting its close affinity126 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 membrane127 stretching between the fore9 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, acting128 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 underlying129 structure of the two animals, a profound fundamental difference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a true squirrel, a rodent72 of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal130 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 fins131; 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 organisation132 it is a thoroughgoing mammal, with an acquired resemblance to the fishy133 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 analogous134 animals of the larger continents that the colonists135 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 badgers136 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 usurps137 the name and place of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figure precisely138 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 prehensile139 tails, by which they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal omnivorous140 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 denizen141 than any of these, a living fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly immemorial and primitive antiquity142. The story of its discovery teems143 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 oasis144 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 ramble145, and you can faintly conceive the delight and astonishment of naturalists146 at large when the barramunda first 'swam into their ken36' in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size and shape this 'extinct fish,' still living and grunting147 quietly in our midst, is comparatively insignificant148 beside the 'dragons of the prime' immortalised in a famous stanza149 by Tennyson: but, to the true enthusiast150, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marvel50 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?olithic 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 unearth151 a real live Ceratodus from a modern estuary152. 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 foraging153 expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it browses154 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 marine45 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 amphibian155 descendants; in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last relic156 of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.
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colonist
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| n.殖民者，移民 | |
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speck
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| n.微粒，小污点，小斑点 | |
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vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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hind
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astonishment
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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isolated
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epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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fore
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mammoth
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| n.长毛象；adj.长毛象似的，巨大的 | |
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elks
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| n.麋鹿( elk的名词复数 ) | |
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colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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pertaining
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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19
attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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20
attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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21
mundane
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| adj.平凡的；尘世的；宇宙的 | |
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22
precept
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| n.戒律；格言 | |
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23
illustrate
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| v.举例说明，阐明；图解，加插图 | |
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24
indigenous
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| adj.土产的，土生土长的，本地的 | |
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25
pouch
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| n.小袋，小包，囊状袋；vt.装...入袋中，用袋运输；vi.用袋送信件 | |
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26
pouched
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| adj.袋形的，有袋的 | |
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27
marsupial
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| adj.有袋的，袋状的 | |
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28
neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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29
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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30
fauna
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| n.(一个地区或时代的)所有动物，动物区系 | |
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31
aboriginal
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| adj.（指动植物）土生的，原产地的，土著的 | |
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32
wombats
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| n.袋熊( wombat的名词复数 ) | |
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33
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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34
evolutionary
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| adj.进化的；演化的，演变的；[生]进化论的 | |
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35
deposition
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| n.免职，罢官；作证；沉淀；沉淀物 | |
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36
ken
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| n.视野，知识领域 | |
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37
subsisted
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| v.（靠很少的钱或食物）维持生活，生存下去( subsist的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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38
candid
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| adj.公正的，正直的；坦率的 | |
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39
formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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40
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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41
naturalist
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| n.博物学家(尤指直接观察动植物者) | |
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42
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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43
geographical
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| adj.地理的；地区(性)的 | |
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44
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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45
marine
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| adj.海的；海生的；航海的；海事的；n.水兵 | |
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46
alteration
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| n.变更，改变；蚀变 | |
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47
hoax
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| v.欺骗，哄骗，愚弄；n.愚弄人，恶作剧 | |
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48
gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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49
lodging
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| n.寄宿，住所；(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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50
marvel
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| vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事 | |
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51
rhinoceroses
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|
| n.钱，钞票( rhino的名词复数 )；犀牛(=rhinoceros)；犀牛( rhinoceros的名词复数 )；脸皮和犀牛皮一样厚 | |
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52
rhinoceros
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| n.犀牛 | |
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53
leopards
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| n.豹( leopard的名词复数 )；本性难移 | |
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54
zoologists
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| 动物学家( zoologist的名词复数 ) | |
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55
canny
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| adj.谨慎的，节俭的 | |
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56
bestowed
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| 赠给，授予( bestow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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57
intrusive
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| adj.打搅的；侵扰的 | |
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58
banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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59
bloodier
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| adj.血污的( bloody的比较级 )；流血的；屠杀的；残忍的 | |
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60
arduous
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| adj.艰苦的，费力的，陡峭的 | |
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61
collateral
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| adj.平行的；旁系的；n.担保品 | |
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62
strata
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| n.地层（复数）；社会阶层 | |
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63
monstrous
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|
| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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64
pal
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| n.朋友，伙伴，同志；vi.结为友 | |
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65
antelopes
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| 羚羊( antelope的名词复数 )； 羚羊皮革 | |
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66
buffaloes
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| n.水牛（分非洲水牛和亚洲水牛两种）( buffalo的名词复数 )；（南非或北美的）野牛；威胁；恐吓 | |
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67
rudiments
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| n.基础知识，入门 | |
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68
rudiment
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| n.初步；初级；基本原理 | |
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69
devour
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| v.吞没；贪婪地注视或谛听，贪读；使着迷 | |
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70
wholesale
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|
| n.批发；adv.以批发方式；vt.批发，成批出售 | |
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71
rodents
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| n.啮齿目动物( rodent的名词复数 ) | |
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72
rodent
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|
| n.啮齿动物；adj.啮齿目的 | |
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73
utterly
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|
| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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74
plantation
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| n.种植园，大农场 | |
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75
elucidation
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|
| n.说明，阐明 | |
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76
remarkable
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|
| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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77
specially
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|
| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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78
perfectly
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|
| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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79
precarious
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|
| adj.不安定的，靠不住的；根据不足的 | |
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80
chili
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| n.辣椒 | |
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81
psychology
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|
| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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82
hopping
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| n. 跳跃 动词hop的现在分词形式 | |
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83
severed
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| v.切断，断绝( sever的过去式和过去分词 )；断，裂 | |
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84
antediluvian
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|
| adj.史前的，陈旧的 | |
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85
sundry
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|
| adj.各式各样的，种种的 | |
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86
wafted
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| v.吹送，飘送，（使）浮动( waft的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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87
flora
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| n.(某一地区的)植物群 | |
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88
spores
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|
| n.（细菌、苔藓、蕨类植物）孢子( spore的名词复数 )v.（细菌、苔藓、蕨类植物）孢子( spore的第三人称单数 ) | |
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89
antiquated
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|
| adj.陈旧的，过时的 | |
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90
unfamiliar
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|
| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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91
foliage
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| n.叶子，树叶，簇叶 | |
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92
vertically
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| adv.垂直地 | |
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93
flattened
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| [医]（水）平扁的，弄平的 | |
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94
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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95
reptiles
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| n.爬行动物，爬虫( reptile的名词复数 ) | |
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96
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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97
mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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98
fermenting
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| v.（使）发酵( ferment的现在分词 )；（使）激动；骚动；骚扰 | |
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99
balks
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| v.畏缩不前，犹豫( balk的第三人称单数 )；（指马）不肯跑 | |
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100
wreck
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|
| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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101
jaws
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| n.口部；嘴 | |
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102
skull
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| n.头骨；颅骨 | |
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103
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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104
prehistoric
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| adj.（有记载的）历史以前的，史前的，古老的 | |
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105
exterminated
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| v.消灭，根绝( exterminate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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106
ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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107
domesticated
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|
| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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108
incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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109
canine
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| adj.犬的，犬科的 | |
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110
ferocious
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| adj.凶猛的，残暴的，极度的，十分强烈的 | |
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111
deduction
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| n.减除，扣除，减除额；推论，推理，演绎 | |
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112
civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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113
blotted
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| 涂污( blot的过去式和过去分词 )； （用吸墨纸）吸干 | |
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114
porcupine
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| n.豪猪， 箭猪 | |
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115
lizards
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| n.蜥蜴( lizard的名词复数 ) | |
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116
peculiarities
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| n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
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117
hierarchy
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| n.等级制度；统治集团，领导层 | |
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118
burrowing
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的现在分词 )；翻寻 | |
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119
aquatic
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| adj.水生的，水栖的 | |
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120
subterranean
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| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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121
spiny
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| adj.多刺的，刺状的；n.多刺的东西 | |
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122
niche
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| n.壁龛；合适的职务(环境、位置等) | |
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123
derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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124
analogue
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| n.类似物；同源语 | |
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125
structural
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| adj.构造的，组织的，建筑（用）的 | |
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126
affinity
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| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
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127
membrane
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| n.薄膜，膜皮，羊皮纸 | |
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128
acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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129
underlying
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| adj.在下面的，含蓄的，潜在的 | |
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130
arboreal
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| adj.树栖的；树的 | |
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131
fins
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| [医]散热片；鱼鳍；飞边；鸭掌 | |
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132
organisation
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| n.组织，安排，团体，有机休 | |
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133
fishy
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| adj. 值得怀疑的 | |
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134
analogous
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| adj.相似的；类似的 | |
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135
colonists
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| n.殖民地开拓者，移民，殖民地居民( colonist的名词复数 ) | |
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136
badgers
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| n.獾( badger的名词复数 )；獾皮；（大写）獾州人（美国威斯康星州人的别称）；毛鼻袋熊 | |
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137
usurps
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| 篡夺，霸占( usurp的第三人称单数 )； 盗用； 篡夺，篡权 | |
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138
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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139
prehensile
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| adj.（足等）适于抓握的 | |
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140
omnivorous
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| adj.杂食的 | |
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141
denizen
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| n.居民，外籍居民 | |
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142
antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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143
teems
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| v.充满( teem的第三人称单数 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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144
oasis
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| n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方 | |
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145
ramble
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| v.漫步，漫谈，漫游；n.漫步，闲谈，蔓延 | |
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146
naturalists
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| n.博物学家( naturalist的名词复数 )；（文学艺术的）自然主义者 | |
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147
grunting
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| 咕哝的，呼噜的 | |
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148
insignificant
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|
| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
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149
stanza
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| n.（诗）节，段 | |
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150
enthusiast
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| n.热心人，热衷者 | |
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151
unearth
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| v.发掘，掘出，从洞中赶出 | |
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152
estuary
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| n.河口，江口 | |
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153
foraging
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| v.搜寻（食物），尤指动物觅（食）( forage的现在分词 )；（尤指用手）搜寻（东西） | |
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154
browses
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| n.吃草( browse的名词复数 )；随意翻阅；（在商店里）随便看看；（在计算机上）浏览信息v.吃草( browse的第三人称单数 )；随意翻阅；（在商店里）随便看看；（在计算机上）浏览信息 | |
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155
amphibian
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| n.两栖动物；水陆两用飞机和车辆 | |
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156
relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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