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Updated: July 31, 2024
The still more marked backwardness of Australia with its kangaroos and duck-billed platypuses shows how much greater is the retardation when a continent is also small and isolated. Today, no less than in the past, the tetrahedral form of the earth and the relation of the tetrahedron to the poles and to the equator preserve the conditions that favor rapid evolution.
She lay on the river-bank with the children, gun in hand, breathless with excitement, waiting for the rising of the duck-billed platypus that quaint combination of fish, flesh and fowl as he dived in the quiet waters, a train of small bubbles marking his track.
"Oh, Pope a chipmunk! He might at least have allowed you the dignity of a bear or a mountain lion!" "There are no mountain lions in these parts," I said with some dignity. "Or a duck-billed platypus. Oh, I say, Pope, it's too rich. I can't help picturing it. Did they coo? Oh, Lord!" "It was nauseating!" I retorted in accents so genuine that he laughed again.
It possesses no tigers or wolves or bears or hyenas; no elephants, squirrels, or rabbits; nor, indeed, any mammals, except such as have been introduced almost within the memory of man, such as horses, sheep, or oxen. It has, however, what are called marsupials: kangaroos, opossums, wombats, and the duck-billed platypus.
The beautifully-timbered plains, or the limestone cliffs of the noble Murray the naked plains that bound on either side the strip of forest-trees of huge dimensions, by which the Lachlan is bordered, the constantly full stream, the water-worn and lightly-timbered banks, the clear open space between the river and its distant margin of reeds, which mark the character of the Murrumbidgee, the low grassy banks or limestone rocks, the cascades and caverns, the beautiful festoons of creeping plants, the curious form of the duck-billed platypus, which are to be found on the Glenelg; the sandstone wastes of the Wollondilly, the grassy surface of the pretty Yarrayne, with its trees on its brink instead of on its bank; the peculiar grandeur of the tremendous ravine, 1,500 feet in depth, down which the Shoalhaven flows; these and many more remarkable features of scenery in the Australian rivers, would afford abundance of materials for description either in poetry or prose.
There is, too, the Tasmanian devil, a small but formidable animal, something like a badger, and the ornithorhynchus, or duck-billed platypus, which figures on some of the postage stamps. This want of energy is a fact, however it may be accounted for. Probably the emigration to Australia of some of the convict families, as above mentioned, has withdrawn some useful members of society.
There I found him again, still reading Swedenborg this time with most of the old things about him, including the Duck-billed Platypus; for nobody, apparently, had shown sufficient interest in them. The shop, therefore, was as I have always known it. There was a spark of a summer's day of 1914 still burning in the heart of a necromancer's crystal ball on the upper shelf by the window.
Besides these, there was a young Monkey, exactly like my brother's boy, Jack; a Mouse, dressed in the last-fashioned paletôt; and a little thing that for a long time I could make nothing of, but I fancy they call her a Duck-billed Platypus.
She tried to eat her roast chicken in a business-like, grown-up manner, while she talked. "I've read about them," she said. "They are dear little animals with long furry tails, much bigger than Sarah's tail, and they climb up trees." "Oh, they climb up trees, do they?" Uncle Victor was very polite and attentive. "Yes. Next to the Ornythrincus or Duck-billed Plat-i-pus.
"If any unknown individual," observed Macallan, "and not Captain Cook, had reported the existence of such an animal as the ornithorhynchus, or duck-billed platypus, without bringing home the specimen as a proof; who would have credited his statement?"
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