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Updated: May 12, 2025
Some naturalists have even classified them in the different groups, but with little success; and it is perhaps better to keep them together, retaining the "pouch" as the common characteristic. The marsupial animals bring forth their young before they are fully developed.
They are placed by the mother in a marsupial pouch on her ventral surface, and here nourished till able to care for themselves. Pardon a moment's digression. The marsupials, except the opossum, are confined to Australia, and the oviparous mammals, or monotremes, to New Zealand.
This most interesting parasite covering the acacia trees when in flower forms a most gorgeous sight; presenting a beautiful contrast to the dull foliage of the surrounding trees. Mr. Wall succeeded in obtaining a specimen of a beautiful little marsupial animal, resembling an opossum in form, but not larger than the common rat, the colour pure white, with very small black spots. Disemma coccinea.
It may be suggested, as another view, that long after the progenitors of the whole mammalian class had ceased to be androgynous, both sexes yielded milk, and thus nourished their young; and in the case of the Marsupials, that both sexes carried their young in marsupial sacks. Mr. On male fishes hatching the ova in their mouths, see a very interesting paper by Prof. Wyman, in 'Proc.
The pouched weasels are very weasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats and mice a close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in this connection, that the one marsupial family which could compete with higher American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the monkey development of the marsupial race.
Such, as I have learned, has been the common verdict given; and as I look round this vast room, on a spot which fifty years ago the marsupial races had under their own dominion, and see the feminine beauty and manly grace which greet me on every side, I can well believe that some peculiarly kind freak of nature has been at work, and has tended to produce a people as strong as it is beautiful, and as clever in its wit as it is graceful in its actions."
This relationship is shown wonderfully as wonderfully as between the fossil and extinct Marsupial animals of Australia by the great collection lately brought to Europe from the caves of Brazil by MM. Lund and Clausen.
The mammalia next in antiquity, of which we have any cognisance, are those of the Upper Oolite of Purbeck, discovered between the years 1854 and 1857, and comprising no less than fourteen species, referable to eight or nine genera; one of them, Plagiaulax, considered by Dr. Falconer to have been a herbivorous marsupial.
The marsupial, it may be explained, is one of the mammalian order, which carries its young about in a pouch for a long time after they are born.
But of these two solitary representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.
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