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Updated: May 12, 2025
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.
Now, every Girton girl is well aware that the opossum, though it is a marsupial too, differs inexpressibly in psychological development from the kangaroo and the wombat. Your opossum, in short, is active, sly, and extremely intelligent. He knows his way about the world he lives in.
They did not go forward, and the survivors are but an infinitesimal fraction of those which perished. Let us take an illustration where palæontology can help us. The earth was at one time covered with marsupial mammals. Some advanced into placental forms. The great mass remained behind. And outside of Australia the opossums are the only survivors of them all.
Whether or not a serious naturalist is justified in excluding from a chapter on marsupial animals a careful and detailed consideration of the bookmaker and the 'bus-conductor, I will not stay to argue. I refrain from dealing at length with these interesting creatures in this place, because of the regrettable absence of specimens from the Zoo.
So curious a provision for the safety of the young in the pipe-fish may be compared to some extent, as I hinted above, with the pouch in which kangaroos and other marsupial animals carry their cubs after birth, till they have attained an age of complete independence.
But perhaps it is not so generally known that, with two or three exceptions, such as the dingo or native dog, the platypus, and several species of bats, the 'whole' of the animals on the continent are marsupial. The brains of this species are very small, and they sadly lack intelligence, in which respect they exhibit a wonderful affinity to the aboriginals who live by their capture.
In the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day.
By way of carnivores, the Tasmanian devil is a fierce and savage marsupial analogue of the American wolverine; a smaller species of the same type usurps the name and place of the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figure precisely like a wolf or a jackal.
Once, I remember, we thought it would never come. We longed restlessly for it, and the more we longed the more it seemed to linger. A meeting of selectors had been held; war declared against the marsupial; and a hunt on a grand scale arranged for this particular Sabbath.
"Nothing like it; they do not, indeed, often come down to the ground; but their activity on trees renders them not unworthy of their family." "I thought," observed Lucien, "that bats were the only mammals that could fly." "There is also the flying phalanger," observed my friend; "an animal of the marsupial order, which is a native of Australia, and somewhat resembles the opossum.
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