When one remembers with what terrible rapidity South Africa was
deprived of nearly all her big game, it is dis- quieting to be told by Sir Hubert Wilkins about " the fast- dwindling fauna of Australia." Whatever the causes, whether as in South Africa the result of "-skin-hunting," whether they be pathological, or due to the progressive desiccation of the whole Continent or to introduced pests like the rabbit and prickly pear, the fauna of Australia, he roundly says, " is in the death-throes." .Therefore, it was that the British Museum planned to send out in the years 1923-5 a collecting expedition with Sir Hubert at its head before it was too late. The record of that mission is now before us in his Undiscovered Australia (Beta, 21s.). The story is interesting from every point of view. There is much about the peculiar fauna of Australia— its various marsupials, its monotremes, and those curious mound-building :turkeys who leave-. their eggs to • hatch out by themselves in fermenting heaps of earth and leaves. Many curious as well as revolting traits of the blackfelloWs arc exhibited. In the northern tropical regionS, on which the expedition chiefly coneentrated,they still lead a.praetically un- disturbed life ; but even they, for some mysterious cause, entirely unconnected with contact with the white man, are gradually disappearing too. The photographs are of- high ethnological value : there is one of an aboriginal woman with
a rudimentary tail. -
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