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Updated: June 2, 2025
We have also the peculiar form of the sternum and rib-bones of the lizards REPRESENTED in the mammalia in certain white cartilaginous lines traceable among their abdominal muscles. Again, the ornithorynchus belongs to a class at the bottom of the mammalia, and approximating to birds, and in it behold the bill and web-feet of that order!
This remarkable animal, called also the Ornithorynchus, is peculiar to Australia, it has the body of a beast combined with the mouth and feet of a duck, is to be seen frequently on the banks of the Glenelg, and that unusually near the coast.
Now these are animals at the bottom of the mammiferous class, adjoining to that of birds, of whose character and organization the monotremata largely partake, the ornithorynchus presenting the bill and feet of a duck, producing its young in eggs, and having, like birds, a clavicle between the two shoulders.
Every hemisphere produces plants of a different species; and it is not by the diversity of climates that we can attempt to explain why equinoctial Africa has no laurels, and the New World no heaths; why calceolariae are found wild only in the southern hemisphere; why the birds of the East Indies glow with colours less splendid than those of the hot parts of America; finally, why the tiger is peculiar to Asia, and the ornithorynchus to Australia.
The timber of the country is of gigantic size, and with other varieties may be found cedar, rosewood, tulip and mahogany. But the most wonderful products of Australia belong to the animal kingdom, among them the kangaroo, the wombat, and that strange anomaly of the animal creation, the Ornithorynchus, or "duck-billed quadruped."
You know how the kangaroo looks in the geography picture av Australia, illustratin' the fauna an' flora, with a tall, thin tree beyont, showin' lack of vegetation in that tropic, an' a little quilly cus they call a ornithorynchus, its mouth like Jim Conlow's? Well, no kangaroo'd had enough self-respect to follow me that night.
The cat that swallowed the greenback should have been added to BARNUM'S "Happy Family," however, instead of being sacrificed to Mammon. With its two-dollar bill it would have been a formidable rival to the Ornithorynchus Paradoxus, or beast with a bill, of Australia.
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