Of course, in the end, the mysterious and tremendous
Captain Lawson proved to be a myth, an airy nothing upon whom
imagination had bestowed a local habitation (in New Guinea) and a name
(not to be found in the Army List). Wallace's Line was saved from
reproach, and the intrusive rhinoceros was banished without appeal from
the soil of Papua.
After the deep belt of open sea was thus established between the bigger
Australian continent and the Malayan region, however, the mammals of the
great mainlands continued to develop on their own account, in accordance
with the strictest Darwinian principles, among the wider plains of their
own habitats. The competition there was fiercer and more general; the
struggle for life was bloodier and more arduous. Hence, while the
old-fashioned marsupials continued to survive and to evolve slowly along
their own lines in their own restricted southern world, their
collateral descendants in Europe and Asia and America or elsewhere went
on progressing into far higher, stronger, and better adapted forms--the
great central mammalian fauna. In place of the petty phalangers and
pouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the
larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the
mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct,
and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the
American prairies. The palaeotherium and the deinoceras, the mastodon and
the mammoth, the huge giraffes and antelopes of sunnier times, succeed
to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata.
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