l the
Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the
woolly-headed Tasmanian, a member of a totally distinct human family,
and perhaps the very lowest sample of humanity that has survived to
modern times, must have crossed over to Tasmania even earlier still, his
brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when
the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the
continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by the
savage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf and
half jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and with a
suspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once his
uncivilisable tendencies.

Omitting these later importations, however--the modern plants, birds,
and human beings--it may be fairly said that Australia is still in its
secondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached the tertiary
and quaternary periods. Here again, however, a deduction must be made,
in order to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the world
never stands still. Though the Australian animals are still at bottom
the European and Asiatic animals of the secondary age, they are those
animals with a difference. They have undergone an evolution of their
own. It has not been the evolution of the great continents; but it has
been evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, more
restricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare the
difference to the difference between the civilisation of Europe and the
civilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted out
their indigenous culture, were still, to be sure, in their stone age;
but it was a very different stone age from that of the cave-dwellers or
mound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is still
zoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a good
deal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of special
situations.

The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhynchus and the
echidna, the 'beast with a bill,' and the 'porcupine ant-eater' of
popular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine living
fossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between the
mammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. The
echidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; the
ornithorhy