The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

Be this as it may, here is our lowest mammalian form, and he has a relation, the Echidna, very like him in many respects, but who has made a decided step forward; for on the sandy shores and in the rocky gorges of Australia, creatures about a foot long, covered with prickly spines like hedgehogs, and called by the settlers “Porcupine Ant-eaters” (see [Fig. 49]), shuffle along in the twilight, thrusting out their long thin tongues from the small mouth at the end of their beak-like snout, and feeding on ants and ants’ eggs. These do not belong, however, to the real ant-eater family, but are near relations to the platypus; and they are well protected by their spines in the battle of life, for when attacked they either roll themselves up into a ball like a hedgehog, or burrow down into the sand so fast that they seem to sink into it, leaving only the points of their prickles sticking out to pierce the feet of their enemy. Now these creatures have a little fold of skin under their body, which forms two little pouches over the milk-giving holes, and the little echidna when very tiny is put into this pouch, and keeps its head there while its body grows larger and sticks out beyond. In this way the Echidna can carry her child about with her, and she only turns it out to shift for itself when its prickles are hard and sharp.

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You see, then, that though we began with the simplest known milk-giving animal, we are, in the Echidna, already fairly on our way to the curious pouched creatures of Australia, the “Marsupials,” which, instead of a small fold, have indeed a large pouch of skin, into which they put their little ones when they are less than two inches long, and so imperfect that their legs are mere knobs, and they can do nothing more than hang on to the nipple with their round sucking mouths as if they had grown to it.

There the little ones hang day and night, and their mother from time to time pumps milk into their mouth, while they breathe by a peculiar arrangement of the windpipe, which reaches up to the back of their nose. Then, as they grow, the pouch stretches, and by-and-by they begin first to peep out, and then to jump out and in, and feed on grass as well as their mother’s milk. For a long time they take refuge in the pouch whenever there is any danger or they are tired, and Professor Owen has suggested that this curious pouch arrangement may be of great use in a country where water is often so far to seek that the little ones could not travel to it unless the mother could carry them.

Fig. 51.

Australian Marsupials.

Kangaroos; a flying Phalanger; and the Kaola or native Bear, with a young one on its back.

Now this race of pouched animals we find spreading all over a land where they had none of the higher four-footed animals to dispute the ground with them, for there are no ordinary land mammalia in Australia, except bats, which could fly thither; mice and rats, which could be carried on floating wood, and a fierce native dog, the Dingo, which was probably brought by the earliest native settlers long after the marsupials had spread and multiplied. And what is more, though we find the bones of marsupials of all sizes buried in the rocks of Australia, some of them as large as elephants,[113] showing that these creatures too had their time of greatness, we do not find those of ordinary mammalia.[114] It would seem, then, that for long ages the pouched animals had the field to themselves, and they made good use of it, filling all the different situations which in other parts of the world are filled by ordinary four-footed creatures.

On the plains, mountains, and red stony ridges are the long-legged Kangaroos every child knows so well in the Zoological Gardens. There they browse upon the grass and leaves as our cattle do in Europe, and some of them, such as the great gray Kangaroo,[115] grow to be as much as five feet high, and can make a good fight even against the fierce dingo dog, hugging him in their arms and ripping him up with the strong nail of the long middle toe of their hind foot, which answers in them to the hoofs of our cattle and deer. And yet they are peaceable enough unless attacked, as they lurk among the tall ferns and grass, and will far rather leap away than turn and attack an enemy. Others are much smaller, such as the Kangaroo Rats, which feed on roots and grasses, one of them, the Tufted-Tailed Kangaroo-Rat,[116] biting off tufts of grass and carrying them in his tail to make a soft nest to sleep in; while the Tree Kangaroos[117] of New Guinea live in the trees, feeding on the leaves and jumping from bough to bough.