There are no Australian representatives
either of horses, or of any other pachydermatous
being: such as a hog, for example,
or an elephant. The ruminating animals,
again, are all of them immigrants; the sheep
were taken to Australia before the wool was
brought from thence; there are no native
sheep, no native oxen, goats, or stags, or other
creatures of the kind. Of the carnivorous
tribes which play so loud a part in the
concert of zoological music at the gardens in
the Regent's Park, there is but one specimen—
the Dingo, or the Native Dog. The marsupials,
in fact, have very nearly the whole country
to themselves, and the country contains very
nearly all the marsupials. There exist
altogether only sixty-seven species of that
curious order, and of those, forty-three are
peculiar to Australia, and the rest (with two
or three exceptions in America) are confined
to New Guinea and the islands lying to the
northward of New Holland. Of the ten
Australian quadrupeds that are not
marsupial, two belong to the order of the toothless,
and are cousins to the sloth and
ant-eater; one is carnivorous; five are nibblers,
cousins to the rabbit; and two are finger-winged
after the manner of the bat. But all
differ from their relations in our neighbourhood
by the possession of a few marsupial
characters.

Of the forty-three Australian marsupials
there are eight genera. They differ much in
size, and form, and habit; they resemble
now one old world animal, and now another,
but they all agree in the peculiarity from
which they get their name—the having a little
pouch in which the young are carried until
they are able to take some care of themselves.
Their young are, in fact, prematurely born,
and it is in the pouch that their development
is completed. Immediately after birth the
unfinished creature is put into its mother's
pocket; there it finds a nipple to which it
fastens, and from which it is able, by a
peculiar arrangement of the throat, to receive
milk before it has enough sense for the business
of sucking. There it hangs and grows
for eight more months; after that time it
becomes a ripe kangaroo baby, and eats
grass, but at first often returns for shelter
to its mother's pocket, or, when too big to be
pocketed, may be seen poking its nose into
the old nest in search of milk. The marsupials
usually have only one little one at a
birth, but I have sometimes shot kangaroos,
and often smaller creatures, with two young
ones attached to the nipples, or at rest, loose
in the pouch.

I will insult nobody by the description of a
kangaroo, but I will specify in a few words
the several varieties. There is the Boomah,
or old man kangaroo: which is the largest of
the class. It is very tall; often eight feet
high when seated in its usual position on the
tripod formed by the hind legs and tail. Its
weight reaches sometimes a hundred and
thirty pounds. In the remote districts of
New South Wales Boomahs are still met with
in considerable numbers, frequenting the
open plains and park-like forests; there they
browse on the grass, or on leaves stripped
from the lower branches of the trees. They
afford sport to the bushmen of the colony,
who hunt them with large fierce dogs,
apparently bred between the mastiff and
greyhound, possessing equal neetness and ferocity.
Only the hind-quarters of the kangaroo are
eaten; they remind an Englishman of venison.
From the skin there is made a very soft and
pliant leather, used by colonial shoemakers
in preference to the best English calf-skin.
There are many smaller varieties, as the
Forester, the Rock, and the Brush Kangaroos;
the Wallaby and Paddymellor; then there is
also the darkly, deeply, beautifully, Blue
Kangaroo—found only in the colonies of Swan
River and South Australia. The Brush
Kangaroo is very plentiful in some parts of
Tasmania, where it forms regular tracks
through the thick undergrowths. Snares are
there placed for it by the settlers, or by men
who hunt it for its skin. The thick scrubby
brush in which this animal is usually found
cannot be hunted through by men, but dogs
are trained to run down and kill the
kangaroo. Returning to the hunter, the dog
shows him where the game has fallen. These
little victims, when taken alive, can be soon
tamed, and will become thoroughly domesticated.
The smaller varieties make very
pretty pets, but they are generally stupid, and
are rarely taught to care about their master,
or even so much as to distinguish him from
strangers. The very slow rate of increase of
the kangaroo, its extreme timidity, and the
continual war waged against it by the blacks
for food, and by the whites for amusement,
sufficiently account for its quick disappearance
from the settled districts. Recklessly hunted
by the settlers, kangaroos seem to be following
the dodo on the road to extermination.

Next in size to the kangaroo is the
Wombat, or native bear. It is like the
common badger in its habits, and a little like
it in appearance. It is a thick, short-legged,
clumsy-looking quadruped, from three to four
feet long, and weighing from twenty to fifty
pounds. I once shot a Wombat in Port Phillip
that weighed fifty-eight pounds—that was
the largest specimen I ever met with. In the
Geelong district, about fifty miles from the
town, near the Colac and Koronomite lakes,
these animals were very numerous a few years
ago. They are social in their habits, and
form extensive settlements in vaults of their
own making underground, of which the long
galleries intersect each other in all directions,
and often reach to a considerable depth.
There are sometimes twenty or thirty ways
into these buried palaces, such gates being
wide conical hollows, gently sloping down to
the mouth of the burrow, which is carefully
fashioned underneath a slab of stone that