Actually the title of this post is misleading, though I allow myself to mislead you because it’s interesting.
In Part I of the Second Discourse on Inequality, there is a footnote that reads:
…[f]or example that of the animal from the province of Nicaragua which resembles a Fox, has feet like a man’s hands and according to Correal, has a pouch under its belly into which the mother puts her young when she has to flee. This is probably the same animal which in Mexico is called Tlaquatzin, and to the female of what Laet attributes a similar pouch serving the same purpose”.
Now that sounds to me like a Kangaroo (or Wallaby). Now, James Cook doesn’t land in Australia til 1770. The Second Discourse was written in the 1750s. Marsupials only exist in Australasia – A MYSTERY!!?!?
Actually no, because I did some research on marsupials, and there exist 13 different species in Central America (although all the ones in North and South America are now saddly extinct), and these are probably the ones Rousseau had heard about.
However, in the process of wasting time I learned something about marsupials which I thought I would share. Namely that they are fucked up. For a start, the females have two vaginas. For a second, the males have two-pronged penises corresponding to the female’s double-vaginas. However, the penises only pass sperm: waste is stored in a ‘cloaca’ which is connected to a urogential sack in both sexes. Pregnant marsupials develop yolk-sacks in their wombs, which they use to feed the embryo in utero. The embryo is born very early, after about 4-5 weeks, after which it crawls up its mothers belly and attaches itself to a nipple, located inside the pouch. The offspring then stays in the pouch for many weeks, occasionally leaving but returning for food and warmth.
Weird.
