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Updated: May 12, 2025
They are the same bodies I have read somewhere that in our bodies you can find evidence of the lowliest ancestry; that about our inward ears I think it is and about our teeth, there remains still something of the fish, that there are bones that recall little what is it? marsupial forebears and a hundred traces of the ape. Even your beautiful body, Nettie, carries this taint. No! Hear me out."
For more than a mile, down a slope, the weedy marsupial outpaced them, but when it came to the hill the daylight between rapidly began to lessen. A few seconds more and all would have been over, but a straggling, stupid old ewe, belonging to an unneighbourly squatter, darted up from the shade of a tree right in the way of Maloney's Brindle, who was leading.
Just as I got clear of the bank of the creek, I heard a faint squeak, and looking about I saw, and immediately caught, a small dying wallaby, whose marsupial mother had evidently thrown it from her pouch. It only weighed about two ounces, and was scarcely furnished yet with fur. The instant I saw it, like an eagle I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying fur, skin, bones, skull, and all.
The pouched animals are not entirely confined to the Australian island. The large island of New Guinea possesses some of them; and there are species in Java, and others of the Asiatic islands. These countries are, in fact, the head-quarters of the marsupial animals.
Nature also sends it to live in Australia, and man, seeing more common sense in the pouch than anywhere else in the creature, calls the entire organism a marsupial, after the pouch. Only one marsupial is allowed to live out of Australia, and that is the opossum; but, then, the opossum is no fool, and can take care of itself in the outer world.
I. It was formerly believed, that all the Mammalia inhabiting the Australian continent, but the wild dog, were marsupial; but as the natural history of the country is better known, we are becoming acquainted with nearly as many native non-marsupial beasts as there are marsupial; but they are certainly, generally, of a small size, such as bats, mice, etc., as compared to the kangaroos and other marsupial genera.
Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may say that the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits or marmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and more or less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful guinea-pig outline.
A step higher in the scale, among the placental Mammals, the structure of the brain acquires a vast modification not that it appears much altered externally, in a Rat or in a Rabbit, from what it is in a Marsupial nor that the proportions of its parts are much changed, but an apparently new structure is found between the cerebral hemispheres, connecting them together, as what is called the 'great commissure' or 'corpus callosum. The subject requires careful re-investigation, but if the currently received statements are correct, the appearance of the 'corpus callosum' in the placental mammals is the greatest and most sudden modification exhibited by the brain in the whole series of vertebrated animals it is the greatest leap anywhere made by Nature in her brain work.
For the opossum is a marsupial; it belongs to the same group of lowly-organized, antiquated, and pouch-bearing animals as the kangaroo, the wombat, and the other belated Australian mammals. Now everybody knows the marsupials as a class are nothing short of preternaturally stupid. They are just about the very dullest and silliest of all existing quadrupeds.
The caecum is a branch or diverticulum of the intestine, ending in a cul-de-sac, and is extremely long in many of the lower vegetable-feeding mammals. In the marsupial koala it is actually more than thrice as long as the whole body.
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