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 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.