casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.
They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, the
flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable
number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by the
wind, or washed by the sea, or carried on the feet or feathers of birds,
from one part of the world to another. In all these various ways, no
doubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia at
different times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect of
its original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of its
plants and trees, Australia must still be considered a very
old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent. The strange
puzzle-monkeys, the quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails grown
into big willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, with
their smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a marvellously
antiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general appearance of Australian
woodland. All these types belong by birth to classes long since extinct
in the larger continents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,
which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown till introduced
from Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and undershrubs of ancient
aspect cover the soil, remarkable for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage,
their vertically instead of horizontally flattened leaves, and their
general dead blue-green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetation
itself, though it contains a few more modern forms than the animal
world, is still essentially antique in type, a strange survival from the
forgotten flora of the chalk age, the oolite, and even the lias.

Again, to winged animals, such as birds and bats and flying insects, the
ocean forms far less of a barrier than it does to quadrupeds, to
reptiles, and to fresh-water fishes. Hence Australia has, to some
extent, been invaded by later types of birds and other flying creatures,
who live on there side by side with the ancient animals of the secondary
pattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be
comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this
respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated
and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very
oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the
mooruk of New Britain. The ext