The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1903-09-27
OUR ANCESTORS
LIVED IN THE SEA
The Water AS the Birthplace of Life.
By PROF. WILHELM BOELSCHE.
Copyright, 1908, by T. c, Mcclure.

his men scared up a troop of giant
kangaroos on the east coast of the Aus
tralian mainland, then discovered for
the first time, Australia has maintained
it's reputation as a geological wonder
land.
There was the black swan, which
still is the symbol of a world topsy-
turvy TO the layman, although not par
ticularly remarkable to the naturalist.
And thence came the story of the
duck-bill whose dried pelt appeared
such a mad thing-a mammal with the
shape of, say, the beaver and with a
regular ducks bill in it's head-that
they who received it suspected that it
was an elaborate practical joke
At last, when the world had accepted
the fact that the animal was ...'gen-
uine' there came the report that it
lays eggs, contrary to the honorable
practice of mammals.
Circumstantial evidence was produced
to the effect that this egg-laying story
at least was not true, and scientists
breathed freely again, believing that
they had saved something at any rate
out of the world of paradoXes.
For a little while they warned each
other against too ready a credence in
this curious field. The aborigines re-
ported terrible monsters in the inn
penetrable interior of the little CONT
lizard. The aborigines evidently were
humbugging.
But then, in 1889, Richard Owen,
the excellent English authority on the
remains of extinct animals, by chance
bought a large bone that came from
Australian territory, the island of New
Zealand. The anatomist recognized
it as the bone of gigantic bird hav-
ing relationship with the ostriches. 1t
was determined then that such gigan-
tic birds had indeed lived in New
Zealand not so long before, although
they are extinct to-day. And THESE
finds opened the way of an entire series
of similar ones on the Australian main
land. Then were found the skeletons
of veritable monsters, all of which
lived there, marsupial animals to whose
family the kangaroo belongs, but tully
as large as lions and even rhlnoceroses'
Egg-Laying Beasts.
After men had become accustomed to
this new knowledge, the duck-bll APP
peared again in the foreground There
remained nothing, after all, but 10
acknowledge that it really did lay eggs
and therefore we, in that respect as
in the others, find most wonderful
Darwinistic link between the mammals
and the reptiles.
In the meantime the list of "incredi-
BILE, vet real" Austrian animals had
been increased with the lizard Hat
terra, of New Zealand, not a, black
giant, it is true, but combining so re-
markably the typical form of lizard OF
to-day with the forms of long extinct
saurians that at last we had to create
for it's benefit an entirely new order
of the reptiles, quite distinct from
lizards, snakes, crocodiles and turtles.
Everywhere else, the deeper we peer
ed, we saw more wonders, be we skep-
tic as we might. Cuckoos ran along
the ground like pheasants and an owl
cried cuckoo" Chicken-like birds
laid their eggs in enormous hill
mounds of wet leaves and left them
there to be quickened by the heat en-
gendered by fermentation as in an ar
tificial oven. In mating time the bow
er bird built himself true marriage
bowers of branches and decorated them
with gaudy blossoms, shells, bones and
all kinds of dusty knick-knacks in a
manner really aesthetic.
On the related island of New Zea-
land, where the mammals seemed to be
missing altogether and the birds to be
developed the more groteSquely, one
parrot lived entirely in the manner of
the owl, a second attacked cattle on
the pasture with savage hooked beak
like a bird of prey, and in the fern
forests there moved in the gloom a
family of tiny ostrich birds-the kiwis,
most of them not much larger than
snipe, and so doubly striking in COM
parison with the same islands mighty
noa ostriches, now extinct, which were
larger than our largest African ostrich.
So Australia was and remained the
land of geological wonders.
The Land of Link-FOrms.
To the thinking observer there ap-
peared in at least a great proportion
of these marvels a distinct thread,