Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/431

Rh The kangaroo is said to be able to clear even more than fifteen feet at one bound.

Rapidity of locomotion is especially necessary for a large animal inhabiting a country subject to such severe and widely-extending droughts as in Australia. The herbivorous animals which people the plains of Southern Africa—the antelopes—are also capable of very rapid locomotion. In the antelopes, however, as in all hoofed beasts, all the four limbs (front as well as hind) are exclusively used for locomotion. But in kangaroos we have animals requiring to use their front pair of limbs for the purposes of more or less delicate manipulation with respect to the economy of the "pouch." Accordingly, for such creatures to be able to inhabit such a country, the hind pair of limbs must by themselves be fitted alone to answer the purpose of both the front and hind limbs of deer and antelopes. It would seem, then, that the peculiar structure of the kangaroo's limbs is of the greatest utility to it; the front pair serving as prehensile manipulating organs, while the hind pair are, by themselves alone, able to carry the animal great distances with rapidity, and so to traverse wide arid plains in pursuit of rare and distant water. The harmony between structure, habit, and climate, was long ago pointed out by Prof. Owen.



The kangaroo breeds freely in this country, producing one at a birth. We have young ones every year in our Zoölogical Gardens. A large number of them are reared to maturity, and altogether our kangaroos thrive and do well. One born in our gardens was lately in the habit of still entering the pouch of its mother, although itself bearing a very young one within its own pouch. These animals have been already more or less acclimatized in England. I have myself seen them in grounds at Glastonbury Abbey. Some were so kept in the open by Lord Hill, and some by the Duke of Marlborough. A very fine herd is now at liberty in a park near Tours, in France.

It is a little more than one hundred and five years since the kangaroo was first distinctly seen by English observers. At the recommendation and request of the Royal Society, Captain (then Lieutenant) Cook set sail in May, 1768, in the ship Endeavor, on a voyage of exploration, and for the observation of the transit of Venus of the year 1769, which transit the travelers observed, from the Society Islands, on June 3d of that year. In the spring of the following year the ship