dodo and the mastodon. The idea
that a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed an
important link in the development of all the higher animals, could never
for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find a
palaeolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or to
discover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircled
summit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modern
estuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the breath of scientific
Europe by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimming
about as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintest
consciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queensland
at the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it as
barramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it with
irreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination,
however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting link of
primary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowest
air-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a true
fish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foraging
expedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There it
browses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise behaves itself in a
manner wholly unbecoming its piscine antecedents and aquatic education.
To fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has both
lungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at will, or, if it
chooses, the two together. Though covered with scales, and most
fish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance both
to salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the North
American mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the
other, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher
animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine
ancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this living
fossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in the
fossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since been
beaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;
in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the last
relic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.

A VERY OLD MASTER

The work of art which lies before me is old, unqu