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Prudence, derived from providence, i.e., prevision, the gift of fore-seeing things, is in many respects almost a synonyme of reason. Physically that gift is typified in the telescopic eyes which monkeys share with a few species of birds, but with hardly any of their mammalian relatives, except man in a state of nature. Mentally it manifests itself in a marvellous faculty for anticipating danger.
The mammalian teeth, while of four kinds, really in most animals serve but two purposes. The front teeth consist of the incisors and canines, and are used for biting. The hind teeth, consisting of premolars and molars, are used for grinding. In the horse, the jaw has lengthened between these two sets, carrying the biting teeth far forward of the molars.
In the mammalian class the males possess rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passage, in their vesiculae prostaticae; they bear also rudiments of mammae, and some male Marsupials have traces of a marsupial sack. The male Thylacinus offers the best instance.
The Monotremata have the proper milk-secreting glands with orifices, but no nipples; and as these animals stand at the very base of the mammalian series, it is probable that the progenitors of the class also had milk-secreting glands, but no nipples.
The fruit thus develops much from little, for every plant draws from the earth a power more abundant than that with which it started, and the fermentation takes place not at one place but at many. Nor does our author hesitate to draw an analogy between the plant and the mammalian embryo.
The Monotremata are plainly allied to the Marsupials, forming a third and still lower division in the great mammalian series. They are represented at the present day solely by the Ornithorhynchus and Echidna; and these two forms may be safely considered as relics of a much larger group, representatives of which have been preserved in Australia through some favourable concurrence of circumstances.
We are familiar with many representatives of different mammalian orders and with the kind of structural characteristics that serve as convenient distinctions in denoting their relationships.
Both monsters were his foes, and the ideal result, in his eyes, would have been for the two to destroy each other. But if he had any preference, it was for the black mammalian beast, the lizard monster appearing to him the more alien, the more incomprehensible and the more impregnable to any strategy that he might devise.
The oviparous monotreme and the marsupial almost certainly represent lower mammalian ancestral stages. But what kind of fish, what species of amphibian, what form of reptiles most closely resembles the old ancestor? How did each of these ancestors look? I do not know. It looks as if our ancestral tree were entirely uncertain and we were left without any foundation for history or argument.
Thus there is a vast negative difference between the Cainozoic and the Mesozoic mammalian faunae of Europe. But there is a still more important positive difference, inasmuch as all these Mammalia appear to be Marsupials belonging to Australian groups, and thus appertaining to a different distributional province from the Eocene and Miocene marsupials, which are Austro-Columbian.
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