Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Here at the Zoo, besides the opossum, we have kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, wombats, and certain other eccentric things, including the Tasmanian devil; but none is a bigger fool than the biggest marsupial, the kangaroo. This is natural, because he has most room to store his imbecility. The kangaroo's general weakness of character is visible all over him.
In like manner, among the mammalia we find in Australia not only living kangaroos and wombats, but fossil individuals of extinct species of the same genera. So also there are recent and fossil sloths, armadilloes and other Edentata in South America, and living and extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and bear in the great Europeo-Asiatic continent.
Evidently, too, he is afraid of my power to harass and annoy him; or why make it a point that I shall only nibble his cheese in a trap at the world's end, stared at by bushmen, and wombats, and rattlesnakes, and alligators, and other American citizens or British settlers! L200 a year, and my wife's father a millionaire! The offer is an insult.
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.
Here we got a supply of water, such as it was so mixed with slime as to hang in strings between the fingers; and, after a hasty breakfast, we proceeded on our journey, mostly through a barren sandy scrub that was a perfect burrow from the number of wombats in it, to within a mile of the hill group, where the country appeared like one continuous meadow to the very base of them.
Then the chairman's voice, that prodigious voice which once had roused them to cheer defiance at rooters from Ohio or Michigan or Indiana, whooped, "Come on, you wombats! All together in the long yell!" Babbitt felt that life would never be sweeter than now, when he joined with Paul Riesling and the newly recovered hero, McKelvey, in: Baaaaaattle-ax Get an ax, Bal-ax, Get-nax, Who, who?
The palæotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata.
"Hurrah!" cried Oliver, "it will soon be almost as light as day, and unless Hector has fallen asleep, we shall find him." We accordingly went on, shouting out as before. Presently my foot slipped into a hole, and I very nearly dislocated my ankle. "What could have made that hole?" I exclaimed. "Wombats, I've a notion," answered Oliver. "Look, there's one of the creatures!"
Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may say that the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits or marmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and more or less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungraceful guinea-pig outline.
It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that's where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. It simply wasn't nice.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking