. Falling in love [microform] : with other essays on more exact branches of science. Science; Science. 100 A FOSSIL CONTINENT. digenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age; but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave- dwellers or mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special situations. The oldest types of animals in Australia are the omithorhynchus and the echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the ' porcupine ant-
. Falling in love [microform] : with other essays on more exact branches of science. Science; Science. 100 A FOSSIL CONTINENT. digenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age; but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave- dwellers or mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special situations. The oldest types of animals in Australia are the omithorhynchus and the echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the ' porcupine ant-eater' of popular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine living fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body ; the omithorhynchus has a bill like a duck's, webbed feet, and a great many quaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds and reptiles. Both, in fact, are early arrested stages in the development of mammals from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could only have struggled on to our own day in a continent free from the severe competition of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europe and Asia. Even in Australia itself the omithorhynchus and echidna have had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature. The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousand minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; the second is a spiny hedge- hog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in the earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licks up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the specialisations brought about by their necessary adaptation to a particular niche in the economy of life, these two quaint and very ancient animals probably preserve for us in their general structure the fe
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