Australia, severed from
all the rest of the earth--_penitus toto orbe divisa_--ever since the
end of the secondary period, remained as yet, so to speak, in the
secondary age so far as its larger life-elements were concerned, and
presented to the first comers a certain vague and indefinite picture of
what 'the world before the flood' must have looked like. Only it was a
very remote flood; an antediluvian age separated from our own not by
thousands, but by millions, of seasons.
To this rough approximate statement, however, sundry needful
qualifications must be made at the very outset. No statement is ever
quite correct until you have contradicted in minute detail about
two-thirds of it.
In the first place there are a good many modern elements in the
indigenous population of Australia; but then they are elements of the
stray and casual sort one always finds even in remote oceanic islands.
They are waifs wafted by accident from other places. For example, the
flora is by no means exclusively an ancient flora, for a considerable
number of seeds and fruits and spores of ferns always get blown by the
wind, 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, no
doubt, modern plants from the Asiatic region have invaded Australia at
different times, and altered to some extent the character and aspect of
its original native vegetation. Nevertheless, even in the matter of its
plants and trees, Australia must still be considered a very
old-fashioned and stick-in-the-mud continent.
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