' 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, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk
period or earlier ages. Isolated from all the remainder of the earth
about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and
the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence,
long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on
nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,
long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and
colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their
race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent
found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from
all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon
itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and
animals out of its own inner consciousness.
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