Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/707

Rh 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 oölite 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 aesthetic bower-birds. Brush-tongued lories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously colored 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 splendor. 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 own canoes, perhaps on the wreck and débris of inundations. Yet even in these cases, again, Australia still maintains its proud preeminence 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 negritto 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,