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Updated: May 12, 2025
Since my return home I observe that Dr. Halford has been publicly rewarded for his discovery. Kangaroo-hunting is one of the great sports of Victoria, but it was not my fortune to see a hunt of this sort. There are now very few, if any, kangaroo in this immediate neighbourhood. Yet there is no lack of marsupial animals of the same character: the opossum is one of these.
Built upon a solid foundation of facts, I maintained an opinion entirely at variance with that of Professor Owen and certain Parisian professors, and satisfied myself, at least, that the young of the kangaroo, and of other marsupial animals, is produced, not in the usual way, but from the teat of the dam.
They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.
For how many thousands of years has this marsupial been a dweller on the plain, all its best faculties unexercised, its beautiful grasping hands pressed to the ground, and its prehensile tail dragged like an idle rope behind it!
If he was able to make his famous prophecy from the jaw which lay upon the surface of a block of stone to the pelvis of the same animal which lay hidden in it, it was not because either he, or any one else, knew, or knows, why a certain form of jaw is, as a rule, constantly accompanied by the presence of marsupial bones, but simply because experience has shown that these two structures are co-ordinated.
Why the line of man's descent was not cut off, who knows? It is a vain speculation. There can be little doubt that in early Tertiary times our ancestor was a small, feeble mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the marsupial kind, powerless before the great carnivorous mammals of that time, and probably escaping them by his greater agility, perhaps by his arboreal habits.
There are now regular autumn wine sales at Melbourne and Geelong, at which large quantities are sold and good prices realised. A favourite sport in Australia is 'possum-shooting. The Australian opossum is a marsupial quadruped, living in trees and feeding on insects, eggs, and fruits.
As we have no complete skeletons of these early mammals we must abstain from picturing their external appearance. It is enough that the living Monotreme and Marsupial so finely illustrate the transition from a reptilian to a mammalian form. There may have been types more primitive than the Duckbill, and others between the Duckbill and the Marsupial.
In accepting the theory of the animal origin of man we have got to follow man back, not only till we find him a naked savage like the Fuegians as Darwin describes them, naked, bedaubed with paint, with matted hair and looks wild and distrustful, but we cannot stop there, we must follow him back till he becomes a troglodyte, a cave-dweller, contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and the hyena for the possession of this rude shelter; back still, till we find him in trees living like the anthropoid apes; then back to the earth again to some four-footed creature, probably of the marsupial kind; still the trail leads downward and ever downward, till we lose it in that maze of marine forms that swarm in the Palaeozoic seas, or until the imagination is baffled and refuses to proceed.
It is then clear that the Marsupials viviparous Mammals without placenta are a necessary transition from the oviparous Monotremes to the higher Placentals with chorion-villi. In this sense the Marsupial class certainly contains some of man's ancestors.
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