All these, from their long hind legs and jumping movements, we should recognise at once; but the plump furry Wombat (see [Fig. 52]) looks more like an ordinary four-footed animal, as it wanders by night burrowing and gnawing the roots of plants. So too do the tree-climbing animals, the Kaola or tailless bear ([Fig. 51]), which often carries its young one on its back, and the beautiful Phalangers or “Australian Opossums,” which live in hollow trees and come out on moonlight nights to feed upon the leaves, hanging from the boughs by their long prehensile tails. Yet all these animals have a pouch for their young, and while the long-tailed furry Phalangers play the part of the fruit-eating monkeys in a land where monkeys have probably never been, another group of them, the “Flying Phalangers” ([Fig. 51]), with a membrane stretching between their front and hind legs, represent the flying squirrels, and live at the very top of the gum trees, feeding on leaves and flowers, and taking flying leaps with their limbs outspread.
These are all vegetable-feeders; and they leave plenty of room for the little insect-feeders, the Myrmecobius, with its long bushy tail, and the Bandicoots or rabbit-rats, which feed partly on bulbs and roots, and more often on insects, grubs, and even small mice and vermin.
But where are the animal-eaters? Surely here, as in other parts of the world, some of the group have taken to feeding on their neighbours? There are very few carnivorous animals in Australia, and these are small, though fierce, and feed chiefly on rats and mice; yet the bones of huge marsupials, with long pointed teeth, found in the rocks, tell us that dangerous animals were once there before they were driven out, probably by the Dingo and savage man. And when we get to Tasmania, where no Dingos are found, there the flesh-eating marsupials still live, as fierce as any wolves and wild cats of Europe, and still they are pouch-bearers. Slim and elegant as the fierce and furry Tiger-wolf ([Fig. 52]) looks as he courses over the Tasmanian plains in search of prey, yet the mother carries her young in a pouch like the gentler wombat or the powerful kangaroo; and so does the mother of the Native Devil or Tiger-cat ([Fig. 52]), which is so fierce that even the natives are afraid of it when it turns at bay, and it will attack and devour large sheep, though it is only the size of a terrier dog.
We see, then, that the marsupials in a world of their own, cut off by the sea from the struggling world beyond, play all parts in life; and squirrels, monkeys, insect-eaters, gnawing animals, hoofed animals, and beasts of prey, all have their parallel among the pouch-bearers. But just because they are so isolated it becomes a curious question why, when we travel right across the wide Atlantic or Pacific to America, we find another set of pouched animals slightly different but belonging to the same group. How comes it that the clever little opossums of Guiana, Brazil, and Virginia (see [Fig. 53], [p. 200]), which grasp the trees with the free nailless great toe of their hind feet and hang by their long tails, should be marsupials, carrying their little ones in pouches, when all their relations are thousands of miles away over the sea?
Fig. 52.
Tasmanian Marsupials.
The two to the left of the picture are Wombats;[118] the front right hand figure the Tasmanian Devil;[119] and the background figure the Tasmanian Wolf.[120]
Stop a moment, and let us go back to those times when the marsupials were living with the great flying reptiles in Europe and North America. These forms (see [p. 183]) were like the little myrmecobius now living in Australia, and at some period, we do not know exactly when, their descendants must have found their way to that part of the world, where they have since branched out into so many curious forms, gnawing, leaping, running, and flying, and filling the place of ordinary quadrupeds. But they must also have lived on in the Northern Hemisphere and branched out into other forms; for much later, when tigers and other ferocious beasts had begun to prowl about in the forests of Europe and America, opossums were leaping in the trees, as we know by finding their bones in Suffolk, under Paris, and in North America. And so we see that when these opossums found their way down south to Brazil and Guiana, the simile that we used a little while ago ([p. 131]) probably became literally true, and the Australian and South American pouched animals are related to each other, not because they come one from the other, but because they both come from the same very ancient stock which once lived in Europe.
This would explain how these active, furry, little beings of all sizes, from that of a good-sized cat to a rat, come to be sporting among the leaves of the grand forests of Brazil or on the edges of the Virginian swamps, sleeping during the day in the hollow trees, and prowling by night over the plantations, and among the rice-fields feeding on fruit and seeds, worms and insects, and even on young birds and rats. On the ground they walk heavily, with flat feet, but in the trees they swing from bough to bough (see [Fig. 53]), the little ones curling their tails round that of their mother and clinging to her back as she goes. Some of these opossums have even lost the pouch, and put their little ones at once on to the thick fur of their back as soon as they come out of their snug nests in the tree-hollows. They seem to have a happy time of it, these merry tree-climbers, and know well how to swing out of danger, or to feign death if they cannot escape, so that “cute as a ’possum” is a common American proverb. One kind, living in the swamps of Guiana, feeds almost entirely on crabs, while another, called the Yapock, has webbed feet and dives under water, feeding on fish and other water-animals.