There the little ones hang day and night, and their mother from time to time pumps milk into their mouth, while they breathe by a peculiar arrangement of the windpipe, which reaches up to the back of their nose. Then, as they grow, the pouch stretches, and by-and-by they begin first to peep out, and then to jump out and in, and feed on grass as well as their mother’s milk. For a long time they take refuge in the pouch whenever there is any danger or they are tired, and Professor Owen has suggested that this curious pouch arrangement may be of great use in a country where water is often so far to seek that the little ones could not travel to it unless the mother could carry them. [Illustration: Fig. 51. Australian Marsupials. Kangaroos; a flying Phalanger; and the Kaola or native Bear, with a young one on its back.] Now this race of pouched animals we find spreading all over a land where they had none of the higher four-footed animals to dispute the ground with them, for there are no ordinary land mammalia in Australia, except bats, which could fly thither; mice and rats, which could be carried on floating wood, and a fierce native dog, the Dingo, which was probably brought by the earliest native settlers long after the marsupials had spread and multiplied. And what is more, though we find the bones of marsupials of all sizes buried in the rocks of Australia, some of them as large as elephants,[113] showing that these creatures too had their time of greatness, we do not find those of ordinary mammalia.[114] It would seem, then, that for long ages the pouched animals had the field to themselves, and they made good use of it, filling all the different situations which in other parts of the world are filled by ordinary four-footed creatures. On the plains, mountains, and red stony ridges are the long-legged Kangaroos every child knows so well in the Zoological Gardens. There they browse upon the grass and leaves as our cattle do in Europe, and some of them, such as the great gray Kangaroo,[115] grow to be as much as five feet high, and can make a good fight even against the fierce dingo dog, hugging him in their arms and ripping him up with the strong nail of the long middle toe of their hind foot, which answers in them to the hoofs of our cattle and deer. And yet they are peaceable enough unless attacked, as they lurk among the tall ferns and grass, and will far rather leap away than turn and attack an enemy. Others are much smaller, such as the Kangaroo Rats, which feed on roots and grasses, one of them, the Tufted-Tailed Kangaroo-Rat,[116] biting off tufts of grass and carrying them in his tail to make a soft nest to sleep in; while the Tree Kangaroos[117] of New Guinea live in the trees, feeding on the leaves and jumping from bough to bough.