They are the last bid for life of the marsupial race
in its hopeless struggle against its more developed mammalian cousins.
In Europe and Asia the opossums lived on lustily, in spite of
competition, during the whole of the Eocene period, side by side with
hog-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 in
the 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 in
many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California. It is
worth while to notice, too, that whereas the kangaroos and other
Australian marsupials are proverbially the very stupidest of mammals,
the opossums, on the contrary, are well known to those accurate
observers of animal psychology, the plantation negroes, to be the very
cleverest, cunningest, and slyest of American quadrupeds. In the fierce
struggle for life of the crowded American lowlands, the opossum was
absolutely forced to acquire a certain amount of Yankee smartness, or
else 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 for
the first time on the coast of New South Wales, saw an animal with short
front limbs, huge hind legs, a monstrous tail, and a curious habit of
hopping along the ground (called by the natives a kangaroo), the
opossums of America were the only pouched mammals known to the European
world in any part of the explored continents.
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