Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2: Discoveries in Australia; with an Account of the Coasts and Rivers; Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in The; Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners; Of the Admiralty. Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits; To the Islands in the Arafura SeaStokes, John Lort
History
Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2: Discoveries in Australia; with an Account of the Coasts and Rivers; Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in The; Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners; Of the Admiralty. Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits; To the Islands in the Arafura Sea
Stokes, John Lort
Australia -- Description and travel; Australia -- Discovery and exploration; Natural history -- Australia
We shall now fulfil our promise to the reader by laying before him the
result of Mr. Bynoe's interesting observations on the Marsupiata, which
the number of wallaby killed at Houtman's Abrolhos afforded him the means
of perfecting. I may preface his remarks by stating, that all the
information I could gain from the colonists on the subject was, that the
young of the kangaroo were born on the nipple, which my own experience
appears to corroborate.
MR. BYNOE'S OBSERVATIONS ON THE MARSUPIATA.
"My first examination," says Mr. Bynoe, "of the kangaroo tribe, to any
extent, occurred at the Abrolhos; there I had an extensive field for
ascertaining the exact state of the uteri of the wallaby of those
islands. I opened between two and three hundred, and never found even the
rudiments of an embryo; but in the pouch I have seen the young adhering
to the nipple from the weight of half a dram to eight ounces and upwards.
On examination, the only substance found in the womb when the animal was
young and full grown, was a cheese-like substance of a straw colour: I
likewise found a similar substance in the pouch around the nipples, and
in many instances where the nipples were much retracted, it completely
covered them, but it was of a darker hue than that in the uterus, and of
a saponaceous or greasy feel; the aperture of the pouch so much
contracted as scarcely to admit two fingers; wombs with their cornua
remarkably small, and nipples in the pouch scarcely pointing, and in many
instances retracted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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