ty-four months allowed as
the maximum in Dr. Buckland's unpleasant experiments. If the amount of
air supplied through a crack or through the texture of the stone were
exactly sufficient for keeping the animal alive in the very slightest
fashion--the engine working at the lowest possible pressure, short of
absolute cessation--I see no reason on earth why a toad might not remain
dormant, in a moist place, with perhaps a very occasional worm or grub
for breakfast, for at least as long a time as the desert snail slept
comfortably in the British Museum. Altogether, while it is impossible to
believe the stories about toads that have been buried in a mine for
whole centuries, and still more impossible to believe in their being
disentombed from marble mantelpieces or very ancient geological
formations, it is quite conceivable that some toads-in-a-hole may really
be far from mere vulgar impostors, and may have passed the traditional
seven years of the Indian philosophers in solitary meditation on the
syllable Om, or on the equally significant Ko-ax, Ko-ax of the
irreverent Attic dramatist. "Certainly not a centenarian, but perhaps a
good seven-year sleeper for all that," is the final verdict which the
court is disposed to return, after due consideration of all the
probabilities _in re_ the toad-in-a-hole.

A FOSSIL CONTINENT

If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be translated
backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into the flourishing woods of
the secondary geological period--say about the precise moment of time
when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck,
on the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean--the
intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet smile of
cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, 'Why, this is
just like Australia.' The animals, the trees, the plants, the insects,
would all more or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind
him in his happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.
The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages for a few million
summers or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound by dates),
and would have landed him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty
much at the exact point whence he first started.

In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter,
Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its
secondary age,