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The development of these organs is intelligible through sexual selection, if the most odoriferous males are the most successful in winning the females, and in leaving offspring to inherit their gradually perfected glands and odours. We have seen that male quadrupeds often have the hair on their necks and shoulders much more developed than the females; and many additional instances could be given.
They are the last relic of the original secondary quadrupeds, stranded for ages in a remote southern island, and still keeping up among Australian forests the antique type of life that went out of fashion in Europe, Asia, and America before the chalk was laid down or the London Clay deposited on the bed of our northern oceans.
At least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the Blossom-Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the prairies; for when man migrates he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his orchard also.
He is, indeed, more remarkable for his indefatigable propensity than for his powers. Single sounds, from whatever source they may come, from birds, quadrupeds, reptiles, or machines, he gives very accurately; but I have heard numbers of Mocking-Birds in confinement attempt to imitate the Canary, and always without success.
The form of geographical surface, and very probably the climate of a given country, depend much on the character of the vegetable life belonging to it. It is true that nature employs birds and quadrupeds for the dissemination of vegetable and even of animal species.
The peninsula is rich in the fur-bearing quadrupeds, and some of these furnish the very best quality of furs that are known to commerce. The sable of Kamschatka is of a superior kind as also the many varieties of the fox. They have, besides, the wolverine and wolf, the ermine and Arctic fox, the marmot and polar hare, and several smaller animals that yield furs of commercial value.
They are cut off, and after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how the seed could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. But the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds.
Unlike most tropical islands there are no indigenous quadrupeds and scarcely any of the feathered tribe in the forests. On the rivers there are a few water-fowl and in the forests the green parrot. There are neither monkeys nor rabbits, but rats and mongooses infest the country and sometimes commit dreadful ravages in the sugar-cane. Ants of different species also abound.
Lyell, that the large quadrupeds lived subsequently to that period, when boulders were brought into latitudes at which icebergs now never arrive: from conclusive but indirect reasons we may feel sure, that in the southern hemisphere the Macrauchenia, also, lived long subsequently to the ice-transporting boulder-period.
You will wonder in what manner this could be effected, inquiring whether the quadrupeds voluntarily performed this nasal imbibing? Our adventurers, witnesses of the fact, wondered also while struck with its quaint peculiarity. There is a proverb that "one man may take a horse to the water, but twenty cannot compel him to drink."
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