the mainland took place.  Early in the morning all formed up in line on the sand spit.  Diverging, but maintaining order, men, gins, piccaninnies, shouting, yelling, and screaming, and clashing nulla-nullas (throwing-sticks), supported by barking and yelping dogs swept the timid wallabies up through the tangle of jungle, until like the Gaderene swine they ran, or rather hopped, down a steep place into the sea, or fell on fatal rocks laid bare by the ebb-tide.  Those who partook of the last of the wallabies have gone the way of all flesh, and the incident is instructive only as an illustration of the manner in which animals may suddenly disappear from confined localities, leaving no relic of previous existence.  Considering the bulk of Dunk Island (3 1/2 square miles), and recognising the rule that islands are necessarily poorer in species than continents, it is yet remarkable that no evidence of marsupials is to be found, and that the oldest blacks maintain that none of the type ever existed here.

Though the drawings in caves depict lizards, echidna, turtle and men, there is no representation of kangaroo or wallaby.  It is highly probable that if such had been common, the black artists would have chosen them as subjects, since nearly all their studies are from Nature.

The largest and heaviest four-footed creature now existent on Dunk Island is the so-called porcupine (spiny ant-eater or echidna).  An animal which possesses some of the features of the hedgehog of old England, and resembles in others that distinctly Australian paradox, the platypus, which has a mouth which it cannot open—­a mere tube through which the tongue is thrust, which in the production of its young combines the hatching of an egg as of a bird, with the suckling of a mammal, and which also has some of the characteristics of a reptile, cannot fail to be an interesting object to every student of the marvels of Nature.  When disturbed, the echidna resolves itself into a ball, tucking its long snout between its forelegs, and packing its barely perceptible tail close between the hind ones, presenting an array of menacing prickles whencesoever attacked.  While in this ball-like posture, the animal, as chance affords, digs with its short strong legs and steel-like claws, tearing asunder roots, and casting aside stones, and the ease and rapidity with which it disappears in soft soil are astonishing.  The horrific array of prickles presented as it digs an undignified retreat, and the tenacity with which it holds the ground, have given rise to the fiction that no dog is capable of killing an echidna.  No ordinary dog is.  He must be cunning, daring, brave, insensible to pain, and resourceful.  Then the feat is quite ordinary.  Indeed, once the trick is learned, the trouble is to keep the dog from attacking its innocent, useful and most retiring enemy.  The echidna has the ill-luck to possess certain subtle qualities, which excite terrific enthusiasm for its destruction on the