"Marsupial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its prehensile tail, marsupial pouch, and cunning ways, stands alone for its singularity among all the animals of the American continent. Many of the tribe are found in South America; but the Virginian opossum, the size of a full-grown cat, is larger than all its relatives. The head and body measure about ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... wild rabbit and of nearly the same colour, but had a broad head terminating in a long very slender snout, like the narrow neck of a wide bottle; and it had no tail. The forefeet were singularly formed, resembling those of a hog; and the marsupial opening was downwards, and not upwards as in the kangaroo and others of that class of animals. This quadruped was discovered on the ground by our native guides, but when pursued it took refuge in a hollow tree from which they extracted it alive, all of them declaring ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Noah's Ark humpeys in their clearings became few and far between, and the long lines of grey two-railed fences melted into gum forest. Now and then, they saw herds of cattle and horses. Once, a company of kangaroos sitting up with fore paws drooping and a baby marsupial poking its head out of the pouch of one of the does. Then, taking fright in a second, all leaped up, long back legs stretched, tails in air, and, in a few ungainly bounds they were lost to sight among the gum trees. Early in the afternoon the train reached the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... opinions.") Surely, cannot an overwhelming mass of facts be brought against such a proposition? Distant parts of Australia possess quite distinct species of marsupials, but surely this fact of their having the same marsupial genera is the strongest tie and plainest mark of an original (so-called) creative affinity over the whole of Australia; no one, now, will (or ought) to say that the different parts of Australia have something in their external conditions in common, causing them to be pre-eminently suitable to marsupials; ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... here described is doubtless the opossum; the only non-Australian marsupial found ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... On one of these occasions I came across a curious animal that bore a striking resemblance to a kangaroo, and yet was not more than two feet high. It could climb trees like an opossum and was of the marsupial family. The pigeons, too, which were very plentiful in these parts, were as large as a big fowl. The headman, or chief, took quite an interest in me, and never seemed tired of conversing with me, and pointing out the beauties of ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Mr. Darwin remarks that it is admitted that the ancestral mammals were allied to the marsupials. Now in the very earliest mammals, almost before they really deserved that name, the young may have been nourished by a fluid secreted by the interior surface of the marsupial sack, as is believed to be the case with the fish (Hippocampus) whose eggs are hatched within a somewhat similar sack. This being the case, those individuals which secreted a more nutritious fluid, and those ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace |
