Windows of Love

families mean always the newest. Now, the earliest mammals to appear onearth were creatures of distinctly marsupial type. As long ago as thetime when the red marl of Devonshire and the blue lias of Lyme Regiswere laid down on the bed of the muddy sea that once covered the surfaceof Dorset and the English Channel, a little creature like the kangaroorats of Southern Australia lived among the plains of what is now thesouth of England. In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marlEurope seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefsand atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenantedby numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached inappearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while othersresembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellentimitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil. Up tothe end of the time when the chalk deposits of Surrey, Kent, and Sussexwere laid down, indeed, there is no evidence of the existence anywherein the world of any mammals differing in type from those which nowinhabit Australia. In other words, so far as regards mammalian life, thewhole of the world had then already reached pretty nearly the same pointof evolution that poor Australia still sticks at.

About the beginning of the tertiary period, however, just after thechalk was all deposited, and just before the comparatively modern claysand sandstones of the London basin began to be laid down, an arm of thesea broke up the connection which once subsisted between Australia andthe rest of the world, probably by a land bridge, _via_ Java, Sumatra,the Malay peninsula, and Asia generally. ‘But how do you know,’ asks thecandid inquirer, ‘that such a connection ever existed at all?’ Simplythus, most laudable investigator–because there are large land mammalsin Australia. Now, large land mammals do not swim across a broad ocean.There are none in New Zealand, none in the Azores, none in Fiji, none inTahiti, none in Madeira, none in Teneriffe–none, in short, in anyoceanic island which never at any time formed part of a great continent.How could there be, indeed? The mammals must necessarily have got therefrom somewhere; and whenever we find islands like Britain, or Japan, orNewfoundland, or Sicily, possessing large and abundant indigenousquadrupeds, of the same general type as adjacent continents, we see atonce that the island must formerly have been a mere peninsula, likeItaly or Nova Scotia at the present day. The very fact that Australiaincloses a large group of biggish quadrupeds, whose congeners onceinhabited Europe and America, suffices in itself to prove beyondquestion that uninterrupted land communication must once have existedbetween Australia and those distant continents.

In fact, to this day a belt of very deep sea, known as Wallace’s Line,from the great naturalist who first pointed out its far-reachingzoological importance, separates what is called by science ‘theAustralian province’ on the southwest from ‘the Indo-Malayan province’to the north and east of it. This belt of deep sea divides off sharplythe plants and animals of the Australian type from those of the commonIndian and Burmese pattern. South of Wallace’s Line we now find several

islands, big and small, including New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, theMoluccas, Celebes, Timor, Amboyna, and Banda. All these lands, whoseprecise geographical position on the map must of course be readilyremembered, in this age of school boards and universal examination, byevery pupil-teacher and every Girton girl, are now divided by minorstraits of much shallower water; but they all stand on a great submarinebank, and obviously formed at one time parts of the same wide Australiancontinent, because animals of the Australian type are still found inevery one of them. No Indian or Malayan animal, however, of the largersort (other than birds) is to be discovered anywhere south of Wallace’sLine. That narrow belt of deep sea, in short, forms an ocean barrierwhich has subsisted there without alteration ever since the end of thesecondary period. From that time to this, as the evidence shows us,there has never been any direct land communication between Australia andany part of the outer world beyond that narrow line of division.

Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by surprise for amoment, under the audacious title of ‘Captain Lawson’s Adventures in NewGuinea.’ The gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some Londonlodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there tohave met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the commontropical Asiatic pattern–rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards.Everybody believed the new Munchausen at first, except the zoologists.Those canny folks saw through the wicked hoax on the very first blush ofit. If there were rhinoceroses in Papua, they must have got there by anoverland route. If there had ever been a land connection between NewGuinea and the Malay region, then, since Australian animals range intoNew Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, and weshould find Victoria and New South Wales at the present day peopled bytapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, deer, elephants, and squirrels, likethose which now people Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, thekangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actuallyform the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater Britain beneaththe Southern Cross. Of course, in the end, the mysterious and tremendousCaptain Lawson proved to be a myth, an airy nothing upon whomimagination had bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace’s Line was saved fromreproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was banished without appeal fromthe soil of Papua.

After the deep belt of open sea was thus established between the biggerAustralian continent and the Malayan region, however, the mammals of thegreat mainlands continued to develop on their own account, in accordancewith the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider plains of theirown habitats. The competition there was fiercer and more general; thestruggle for life was bloodier and more arduous. Hence, while theold-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly alongtheir own lines in their own restricted southern world, theircollateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America or elsewhere wenton progressing into far higher, stronger, and better adapted forms–the

great central mammalian fauna. In place of the petty phalangers andpouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in thelarger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of themammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct,and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and theAmerican prairies. The palaeotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon andthe mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeedto the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata. Slowlythe horses grow more horse-like, the shadowy camel begins to camelisehimself, the buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branchout by tentative steps into still more complicated and more complicatedantlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammaliantype, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the oldermarsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the facesof their more successful competitors; the new carnivores devour themwholesale, the new ruminants eat up their pastures, the new rodentsoutwit them in the modernised forests. At last the pouched creatures alldisappear utterly from all the world, save only Australia, with thesolitary exception of a single advanced marsupial family, the familiaropossum of plantation melodies. And the history of the opossum himselfis so very singular that it almost deserves to receive the politeattention of a separate paragraph for its own proper elucidation.

For the opossums form the only members of the marsupial class now livingoutside Australia; and yet, what is at least equally remarkable, none ofthe opossums are found _per contra_ in Australia itself. They are, infact, the highest and best product of the old dying marsupial stock,specially evolved in the great continents through the fierce competitionof the higher mammals then being developed on every side of them.Therefore, being later in point of time than the separation, they couldno more get over to Australia than the elephants and tigers andrhinoceroses could. They are the last bid for life of the marsupial racein its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite ofcompetition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side withhog-like creatures not yet perfectly piggish, with nondescript animals,half horse half tapir, and with hornless forms of deer and antelopes,unprovided, so far, with the first rudiment of budding antlers. But inthe succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent,though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb,and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence inmany forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It isworth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos and otherAustralian marsupials are proverbially the very stupidest of mammals,the opossums, on the contrary, are well known to those accurateobservers of animal psychology, the plantation negroes, to be the verycleverest, cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fiercestruggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum wasabsolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smartness, orelse to be improved off the face of the earth by the keen competition of

the pouchless mammals.

Up to the day, then, when Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, landing forthe first time on the coast of New South Wales, saw an animal with shortfront limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit ofhopping along the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), theopossums of America were the only pouched mammals known to the Europeanworld in any part of the explored continents. Australia, severed fromall the rest of the earth–_penitus toto orbe divisa_–ever since theend of the secondary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in thesecondary age so far as its larger life-elements were concerned, andpresented to the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture ofwhat ‘the world before the flood’ must have looked like. Only it was avery remote flood; an antediluvian age separated from our own not bythousands, but by millions, of seasons.

To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needfulqualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is everquite correct until you have contradicted in minute detail abouttwo-thirds of it.

In the first place there are a good many modern elements in theindigenous population of Australia; but then they are elements of thestray and casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, theflora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerablenumber of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by thewind, 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, nodoubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia atdifferent times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect ofits original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of itsplants and trees, Australia must still be considered a veryold-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent. The strangepuzzle-monkeys, the quaint-jointed casuarinas (like horsetails growninto big willows), and the park-like forests of blue gum-trees, withtheir smooth stems robbed of their outer bark, impart a marvellouslyantiquated and unfamiliar tone to the general appearance of Australianwoodland. All these types belong by birth to classes long since extinctin the larger continents. The scrub shows no turfy greensward; grasses,which elsewhere carpet the ground, were almost unknown till introducedfrom Europe; in the wild lands, bushes, and undershrubs of ancientaspect cover the soil, remarkable for their stiff, dry, wiry foliage,their vertically instead of horizontally flattened leaves, and theirgeneral dead blue-green or glaucous colour. Altogether, the vegetationitself, though it contains a few more modern forms than the animalworld, is still essentially antique in type, a strange survival from theforgotten 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, toreptiles, and to fresh-water fishes. Hence Australia has, to someextent, been invaded by later types of birds and other flying creatures,who live on there side by side with the ancient animals of the secondarypattern. Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all becomparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in thisrespect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquatedand undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those veryoldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and themooruk of New Britain. The extreme term in this exceedingly ancient setof creature is given us by the wingless bird, the apteryx or kiwi of NewZealand, whose feathers nearly resemble hair, and whose grotesqueappearance makes it as much a wonder in its own class as thepuzzle-monkey and the casuarina are among forest trees. No featheredcreatures so closely approach the lizard-tailed birds of the oolite orthe toothed birds of the cretaceous period as do these Australian andNew Zealand emus and apteryxes. Again, while many characteristicOriental families are quite absent, like the vultures, woodpeckers,pheasants and bulbuls, the Australian region has many other fairlyancient birds, found nowhere else on the surface of our modern planet.Such are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the onlyfeathered things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them tobe hatched, after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or offermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, thelyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australianregion. So are the wonderful and aesthetic bower-birds. Brush-tonguedlories, black cockatoos, and gorgeously coloured pigeons, thoughsomewhat less antique, perhaps, in type, give a special character to thebird-life of the country. And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the sameold continent, the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the wholeworld, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the remote past, somegolden age of Saturnian splendour. Poetry apart, into which I havedropped for a moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, infact, gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in arich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and enemiesunknown.

Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have passed overto Australia at various times by pure chance. They fall into twoclasses–the rats and mice, who doubtless got transported across onfloating logs or balks of timber; and the human importations, includingthe dog, who came, perhaps on their owners’ canoes, perhaps on the wreckand _debris_ of inundations. Yet even in these cases again, Australiastill maintains its proud pre-eminence as the most antiquated andunprogressive of continents. For the Australian black-fellow must havegot there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremelyancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull theNeanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while thewoolly-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, hisbrethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on whenthe stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon thecontinent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.As for the dingo, or Australian wild dog, only half domesticated by thesavage natives, he represents a low ancestral dog type, half wolf andhalf jackal, incapable of the higher canine traits, and with asuspicious, ferocious, glaring eye that betrays at once hisuncivilisable tendencies.

Omitting these later importations, however–the modern plants, birds,and human beings–it may be fairly said that Australia is still in itssecondary stage, while the rest of the world has reached the tertiaryand quaternary periods. Here again, however, a deduction must be made,in order to attain the necessary accuracy. Even in Australia the worldnever stands still. Though the Australian animals are still at bottomthe European and Asiatic animals of the secondary age, they are thoseanimals with a difference. They have undergone an evolution of theirown. It has not been the evolution of the great continents; but it hasbeen evolution all the same; slower, more local, narrower, morerestricted, yet evolution in the truest sense. One might compare thedifference to the difference between the civilisation of Europe and thecivilisation of Mexico or Peru. The Mexicans, when Cortez blotted outtheir 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 ormound builders in Britain. Even so, though Australia is stillzoologically in the secondary period, it is a secondary period a gooddeal altered and adapted in detail to meet the wants of specialsituations.

The oldest types of animals in Australia are the ornithorhynchus and theechidna, the ‘beast with a bill,’ and the ‘porcupine ant-eater’ ofpopular natural history. These curious creatures, genuine livingfossils, occupy in some respects an intermediate place between themammals on the one hand and the birds and lizards on the other. Theechidna has no teeth, and a very bird-like skull and body; theornithorhynchus has a bill like a duck’s, webbed feet, and a great manyquaint anatomical peculiarities which closely ally it to the birds andreptiles. Both, in fact, are early arrested stages in the development ofmammals from the old common vertebrate ancestor; and they could onlyhave struggled on to our own day in a continent free from the severecompetition of the higher types which have since been evolved in Europeand Asia. Even in Australia itself the ornithorhynchus and echidna havehad to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature.The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousandminute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; thesecond is a spiny hedgehog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself inthe earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licksup greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from thespecialisations brought about by their necessary adaptation to a

particular niche in the economy of life, these two quaint and veryancient animals probably preserve for us in their general structure thefeatures of an extremely early descendant of the common ancestor fromwhom mammals, birds, and reptiles alike are originally derived.

The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to far less ancient typesthan ornithorhynchus and echidna, but they too are very old instructure, though they have undergone an extraordinary separateevolution to fit them for the most diverse positions in life. Almostevery main form of higher mammal (except the biggest ones) has, as itwere, its analogue or representative among the marsupial fauna of theAustralasian region fitted to fill the same niche in nature. Forinstance, in the blue gum forests of New South Wales a small animalinhabits the trees, in form and aspect exactly like a flying squirrel.Nobody who was not a structural and anatomical naturalist would ever fora moment dream of doubting its close affinity to the flying squirrels ofthe American woodlands. It has just the same general outline, just thesame bushy tail, just the same rough arrangement of colours, and justthe same expanded parachute-like membrane stretching between the foreand hind limbs. Why should this be so? Clearly because both animals haveindependently adapted themselves to the same mode of life under the samegeneral circumstances. Natural selection, acting upon unlike originaltypes, but in like conditions, has produced in the end very similarresults in both cases. Still, when we come to examine the more intimateunderlying structure of the two animals, a profound fundamentaldifference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a truesquirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arborealexistence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of themarsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account verymuch the same adaptation, for very much the same reasons. Just so adolphin looks externally very like a fish, in head and tail and form andmovement; its flippers closely resemble fins; and nothing about itseems to differ very markedly from the outer aspect of a shark or acodfish. But in reality it has no gills and no swim-bladder; it lays noeggs; it does not own one truly fish-like organ. It breathes air, itpossesses lungs, it has warm blood, it suckles its young; in heart andbrain and nerves and organisation it is a thorough-going mammal, with anacquired resemblance to the fishy form, due entirely to mere similarityin place of residence.

Running hastily through the chief marsupial developments, one may saythat the wombats are pouched animals who take the place of rabbits ormarmots in Europe, and resemble them both in burrowing habits and moreor less in shape, which closely approaches the familiar and ungracefulguinea-pig outline. The vulpine phalanger does duty for a fox; the fatand sleepy little dormouse phalanger takes the place of a Europeandormouse. Both are so ridiculously like the analogous animals of thelarger continents that the colonists always call them, in perfect goodfaith, by the familiar names of the old-country creatures. The koalaposes as a small bear; the cuscus answers to the racoons of America. The

pouched badgers explain themselves at once by their very name, like thePlyants, the Pinchwifes, the Brainsicks, and the Carelesses of theRestoration comedy. The ‘native rabbit’ of Swan River is a rabbit-likebandicoot; the pouched ant-eater similarly takes the place of the trueant-eaters of other continents. By way of carnivores, the Tasmaniandevil is a fierce and savage marsupial analogue of the Americanwolverine; a smaller species of the same type usurps the name and placeof the marten; and the dog-headed Thylacinus is in form and figureprecisely like a wolf or a jackal. The pouched weasels are veryweasel-like; the kangaroo rats and kangaroo mice run the true rats andmice a close race in every particular. And it is worth notice, in thisconnection, that the one marsupial family which could compete withhigher American life, the opossums, are really, so to speak, the monkeydevelopment of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, whichmake their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by whichthey hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arborealomnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds’ eggs, insects, androots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent,tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.

Australia has also one still more ancient denizen than any of these, aliving fossil of the very oldest sort, a creature of wholly immemorialand primitive antiquity. The story of its discovery teems with thestrangest romance of natural history. To those who could appreciate thefacts of the case it was just as curious and just as interesting asthough we were now to discover somewhere in an unknown island or anAfrican oasis some surviving mammoth, some belated megatherium, or somegigantic and misshapen liassic saurian. Imagine the extinct animals ofthe Crystal Palace grounds suddenly appearing to our dazzled eyes in atropical ramble, and you can faintly conceive the delight andastonishment of naturalists at large when the barramunda first ’swaminto their ken’ in the rivers of Queensland. To be sure, in size andshape this ‘extinct fish,’ still living and grunting quietly in ourmidst, is comparatively insignificant beside the ‘dragons of the prime’immortalised in a famous stanza by Tennyson: but, to the trueenthusiast, size is nothing; and the barramunda is just as much a marveland a monster as the Atlantosaurus himself would have been if he hadsuddenly walked upon the stage of time, dragging fifty feet oflizard-like tail in a train behind him. And this is the plain story ofthat marvellous discovery of a ‘missing link’ in our own pedigree.

In the oldest secondary rocks of Britain and elsewhere there occur inabundance the teeth of a genus of ganoid fishes known as the Ceratodi.(I apologise for ganoid, though it is not a swear-word). These teethreappear from time to time in several subsequent formations, but at lastslowly die out altogether; and of course all naturalists naturallyconcluded that the creature to which they belonged had died out also,and was long since numbered with the dodo and the mastodon. The ideathat a Ceratodus could still be living, far less that it formed animportant link in the development of all the higher animals, could never

for a moment have occurred to anybody. As well expect to find apalaeolithic man quietly chipping flints on a Pacific atoll, or todiscover the ancestor of all horses on the isolated and crag-encircledsummit of Roraima, as to unearth a real live Ceratodus from a modernestuary. In 1870, however, Mr. Krefft took away the breath of scientificEurope by informing it that he had found the extinct ganoid swimmingabout as large as life, and six feet long, without the faintestconsciousness of its own scientific importance, in a river in Queenslandat the present day. The unsophisticated aborigines knew it asbarramunda; the almost equally ignorant white settlers called it withirreverent and unfilial contempt the flat-head. On further examination,however, the despised barramunda proved to be a connecting link ofprimary rank between the oldest surviving group of fishes and the lowestair-breathing animals like the frogs and salamanders. Though a truefish, it leaves its native streams at night, and sets out on a foragingexpedition after vegetable food in the neighbouring woodlands. There itbrowses on myrtle leaves and grasses, and otherwise behaves itself in amanner wholly unbecoming its piscine antecedents and aquatic education.To fit it for this strange amphibious life, the barramunda has bothlungs and gills; it can breathe either air or water at will, or, if itchooses, the two together. Though covered with scales, and mostfish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance bothto salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the NorthAmerican mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on theother, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higheranimals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marineancestors. It is very interesting, therefore, to find that this livingfossil link between fish and reptiles should have survived only in thefossil continent, Australia. Everywhere else it has long since beenbeaten out of the field by its own more developed amphibian descendants;in Australia alone it still drags on a lonely existence as the lastrelic of an otherwise long-forgotten and extinct family.

A VERY OLD MASTER

The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a gooddeal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of hisown archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation ofthe world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is abas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin thanthe most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, themildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable BritishMuseum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacledeyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptorscarved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib’s hair,just like a modern coachman’s wig, this work of primaeval art was already

hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in themorning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses orSesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave inthe Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possessauthentic records of man’s abode upon this oblate spheroid into tenepochs–an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn’t commitone to any definite chronology in particular–then it is probable thatall known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth ofthe epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-reliefwould fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I shouldsay it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adamaccording to Ussher.

The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, andrepresents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following oneanother, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the airsuspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly exciteunfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their ‘points’ are undoubtedly coarseand clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; theirmanes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble andspindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of thedomestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passingthe love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there islittle (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on thewhole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedinglyremote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of theprehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hueand striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roamover the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grassand tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not onlydo the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this,but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is somuch easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar livinghorse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the hightable-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky’s horse (you see, as I have onlyto write the word, without uttering it, I don’t mind how often or howintrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat,or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can’t dobetter than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.

The horse family of the present day is divided, like most otherfamilies, into two factions, which may be described for variety’s sakeas those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including alsothe zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names,in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors atthe Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broaddistinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering ofthe tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra andco., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or