Excerpt from A Hand-Book to the Marsupialia and Monotremata The volume which Mr. Lydekker has written will, I believe, be found to be very useful to the student of Mammalia. The volumes of Gould's "Mammals of Australia" are both rare and costly, and the object of the "Naturalist's Library" is to give, within a handy compass, a scientific, and yet popular, account of the Australian Mammals. For the scientist, Mr. Oldfield Thomas's "Catalogue of the Marsupialia and Monotremata in the collection of the British Museum" is the indispensable compendium of our knowledge of these two Orders up to the year 1888. During the six years which have since elapsed, a few new species have been described, and these have been added in the present work by Mr. Lydekker, whose notes on the fossil species, on which he is one of the first authorities, lend an additional interest to the volume. Especial care has been bestowed upon the plates. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Have you ever seen a string bag decorated with jaw bones or bits of fur and wondered what animal they came from? Or seen animals offered for sale, live or dead, cooked or uncooked, in local markets and wondered what they were? This book may help you to identify local fauna that you may see when you travel around New Guinea and the islands of eastern Indonesia. Here are descriptions or all the native marsupial and monotreme animals with an account of their way of life together with suggestions for further reading and notes on their care in captivity.