"Advance Australia" is the fitting motto of the
present human inhabitants of that promising country; but the
standard of progress has been set up in a land which had remained
during millions of years the Chinese Empire of the living world.
Australia is a fragment of the Middle Ages of the earth, a
province fenced round by nature at least three million years ago
and preserving, amongst its many invaluable types of life,
representatives of that primitive mammal population which we are
seeking to understand.
It is now well known that the Duckbill or Platypus
(Ornithorhyncus) and the Spiny Anteater (Echidna) of Australia
and Tasmania--with one representative of the latter in New
Guinea, which seems to have been still connected--are
semi-reptilian survivors of the first animals to suckle their
young. Like the reptiles they lay tough-coated eggs and have a
single outlet for the excreta, and they have a reptilian
arrangement of the bones of the shoulder-girdle; like the
mammals, they have a coat of hair and a four-chambered heart, and
they suckle the young. Even in their mammalian features they are,
as the careful research of Australian zoologists has shown, of a
transitional type.
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