And in New Guinea, an isolated bit of the same
old continent, the birds of paradise, found nowhere else in the whole
world, seem to recall some forgotten Eden of the remote past, some
golden age of Saturnian splendour. Poetry apart, into which I have
dropped for a moment like Mr. Silas Wegg, the birds of paradise are, in
fact, gorgeously dressed crows, specially adapted to forest life in a
rich fruit-bearing tropical country, where food is abundant and enemies
unknown.
Last of all, a certain small number of modern mammals have passed over
to Australia at various times by pure chance. They fall into two
classes--the rats and mice, who doubtless got transported across on
floating logs or balks of timber; and the human importations, including
the dog, who came, perhaps on their owners' canoes, perhaps on the wreck
and _debris_ of inundations. Yet even in these cases again, Australia
still maintains its proud pre-eminence as the most antiquated and
unprogressive of continents. For the Australian black-fellow must have
got there a very long time ago indeed; he belongs to an extremely
ancient human type, and strikingly recalls in his jaws and skull the
Neanderthal savage and other early prehistoric races; while the
woolly-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, his
brethren on the mainland having no doubt been exterminated later on when
the stone-age Australian black-fellows first got cast ashore upon the
continent inhabited by the yet more barbaric and helpless negrito race.
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