vered in her stalactitic caves, and the huge skeletons, or parts of skeletons, which have been exhumed from her alluvial beds, testify that Australia must be of remote origin. It is scarcely necessary to remark that all these remains belong to Marsupial animals; nor must it be imagined that I am oblivious of the fact that the remains of members of this group have been found in the older tertiary and secondary strata of Europe. I merely glance at these things, and leave their consideration to those who pay special attention to the sister science of geology.
Although the more highly organized animals do not inhabit, and seem never to have inhabited Australia, it is not a little interesting to observe how completely the law of representation is manifested among her mammals—how one family typifies another in the higher groups of the Placentalia; or, to be more explicit, to note how the Herbivora are represented by the Kangaroos, the Felinæ by the Dasyures, the Jerboas by the Hapalotides, &c. When speaking of the wonderful fossil Diprotodon, in his work on Palaeontology, Professor Owen states—"Australia yields evidence of an analogous correspondence between its last extinct and its present aboriginal mammalian- fauna, which is the more interesting on account of the very peculiar organization of most of the native quadrupeds of that division of the globe. That the Marsupialia form one great natural group is now generally admitted by zoologists; the representatives in that group of many of the orders of the more exclusive Placental subclass of the Mammalia of the larger continents have also been recognized in the existing genera and species: the Dasyures, for example, play the parts of the Carnivora; the Bandicoots (Perameles), of the Insectivora; the Phalangers, of the Quadrumana; the Wombat, of the Rodentia; and the Kangaroos, in a remoter degree, of the Ruminantia. The first collection of mammalian fossils from the ossiferous caves of Australia brought to light the former existence on that continent of larger species of the same peculiar marsupial genera: some, as the Thylacine, and the Dasyurine subgenus represented
