related to the country north of the Kirchner range, watered by the Lynd, the Mitchell, the Walsh, and the Palmer Rivers, on the east side of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The coasting expedition of Mr G. Elphinstone Dalrymple, with Messrs Hill and Johnstone, finishing in December 1873, effected a valuable survey of the inlets and navigable rivers in the Cape York peninsula. The Endeavour River, in S. lat. 16°, which was visited by Captain Cook a hundred years ago, seems capable of being used for communication with the country inland. A newly discovered river, the Johnstone or Gladys, is said to flow through a very rich land, producing the finest cedars, with groves of bananas, nutmeg, ginger, and other tropical plants. The colonial geologists predict that the north-east corner of Australia will be found to possess great mineral treasures. At the opposite extremity of the continent, its south-west corner, a tour lately made by Mr A. Forrest, Government surveyor, from the Swan River eastward, and thence down to the south coast, has shown the poorness of that region. The vast superiority of eastern Australia to all the rest is the most important practical lesson taught by the land-exploring labours of the last half century.

Physical Description. The continent of Australia, with a circumference of nearly 8000 miles, presents a contour wonderfully devoid of inlets from the sea, except upon its northern shores, where the coast line is largely indented. The Gulf of Carpentaria, situated in the north, is enclosed on the east by the projection of Cape York, and on the west by Arnhem Land, and forms the principal bay on the whole coast, measuring about 6° of long. by 6° of lat. Further to the west, Van Diemen's Gulf, though much smaller, forms a better protected bay, having Melville Island between it and the ocean; while beyond this Queen's Channel and Cambridge Gulf form inlets about S. lat. 14° 50'. On the north-west of the continent the coast line is much broken, the chief indentations being Admiralty Gulf, Collier Bay, and King Sound, on the shores of Tasman Land. Western Australia, again, is not favoured with many inlets-Exmouth Gulf and Shark Bay being the only bays of any size. The same remark may be made of the rest of the sea-board; for, with the exception of Spencer Gulf, the Gulf of St Vincent, and Port Phillip, on the south, and Moreton Bay, Hervey Bay, and Broad Sound, in the east, the coast line is singularly uniform.

The conformation of the interior of Australia is very peculiar, and may perhaps be explained by the theory of the land having been, at a comparatively recent period, the bed of an ocean. The mountain ranges parallel to the east and west coasts would then have existed as the cliffs and uplands of many groups of islands, in widely scattered archipelagoes resembling those of the Pacific. The singular positions and courses of some of the rivers lend force to this supposition. The Murray and its tributaries, the Murrumbidgee, the Lachlan, and the Darling, rising from the mountains on the east coast, flow inwards so far that they were at one time supposed to issue in a central sea. They do, in fact, spend their waters in a large shallow lake; but this is not far from the south coast, and is provided with an outlet to the ocean. The Macquarie and the Lachlan merge in extensive swamps, and their beds in the dry season become a mere chain of ponds. This agrees with the idea that the whole country was a sea-bottom, which has scarcely yet assumed the character of permanent dry land, while another proof consists in the thinness and sterility of the soil in the lowlands.

Along the entire line of the east coast there extends a succession of mountain ranges from Portland, in Victoria, to Cape York in the extreme north, called in different parts the Australian Grampians, the Australian Alps, the Blue Mountains, the Liverpool Range, and other names. These

107

constitute, like the Andes of South America, a regular Cordillera, stretching from north to south 1700 miles in length, with an average height of 1500 feet above the sea. The rivers flowing down the eastern slope, having but short courses before they reach the sea, are of a more determined character than those which take a westerly and inland direction. They cut their way through the sandstone rocks in deep ravines; but from their tortuous and violent course, and from the insufficient volume of water, they are unfit for navigation. Very few of them traverse more than 200 miles, inclusive of windings, or pass through any district extending more than 50 miles inland. different with the Murray, flowing westward, which has a course of 1100 miles, traversing a space from east to west measuring 8° of longitude. The Murray is navigable during eight months of the year along a great part of its course. This great river, with its tributaries, drains

It is

a basin the area of which is reckoned at half a million of square miles. Yet it has no proper outlet to the sea, debouching into a lagoon called Lake Alexandrina, on the sea-coast of Encounter Bay. On the opposite or northwestern part of the continent there are several important water-courses. One river, the Victoria, which rises somewhere about 18° or 19° S. lat. and 131° E. long., flows northward to 15° 30′ S. lat., where it turns westward. Its bed forms a deep channel through the sandstone tableland, with cliffs 300 feet high, while in width it sometimes extends to half a mile, its depth varying from 50 feet to as many fathoms. The Victoria debouches into Cambridge Gulf, 14° 14′ S. lat. and 129° 30′ E. long., an estuary 20 miles broad, with a depth of 8 or 10 fathoms. To the westward of this district run two other large rivers, the Prince Regent and the Glenelg, the latter being navigable, with a fertile country on its banks. The Roper, a navigable stream in Arnhem Land, has a width of 500 to 800 yards 40 or 50 miles from its mouth, which is at the Limmen Bight in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In the more settled and inhabited provinces of Australia there are the Brisbane, the Fitzroy, and the Burdekin, rivers of Queensland; the Glenelg River, of Victoria; and the Swan River, of West Australia. But this continent cannot boast of a Nile, an Indus, or a Mississippi, and the interior suffers from the want of water communication.

Geology. The interior plain of Australia, enclosed by the coast mountain ranges, is a vast concave table of sandstone, with a surface area of 1,500,000 square miles. The sedimentary rock, in some parts, has been washed away or scooped out; but in the opinion of Mr W. H. L. Ranken (Dominion of Australia, 1874), the edges of the plateau, where highest and least reduced by denudation, are actually formed of this sediment. While the southern margin of the plain consists of walls of sandstone cliffs, extending along the sea-coast, the plateau on the east, south-east, the west, and partly on the north, is bordered by terraced ramparts of mountains. These elevations consist of granite and syenite on the west side, rising from 1000 to 3000 feet in height. On the east side, in New South Wales and Gipps' Land, they rise to a much greater height, attaining 7000 feet at the south-east corner in the Australian Alps. Here, too, the sandstone masses are often violently rent asunder, and mingled with the overflows of igneous matter, forming basalt and trap. On the north side of the continent, except around the Gulf of Carpentaria, the edge of the sandstone table-land has a great elevation; it is cut by the Alligator River into gorges 3800 feet deep.

In examining more particularly the geological structure of eastern Australia, we must take into account the neighbouring island of Tasmania. The late Count Strzelecki, author of the first scientific essay upon the subject, in 1845, after minutely describing all the mountain ranges of

New South Wales, passes on to Wilson Promontory, the most southerly point of Australia, whence he looks seaward at the islands in Bass's Strait. As he there observes the Tasmanian mountains, with which he is equally familiar, it occurs to him that the whole is the result of identical forces, operating in a direction from north-east to south-west. Such phenomena he ascribes to a series of "volcanoes of elevation," along a vast fissure of the earth, upon the line regarded by him as "the Australian eastern axis of perturbation." These forces he believes to have been exerted, with different degrees of intensity, at four several epochs, which are indicated by the character of the sedimentary rocks, broken through or contorted by the eruptive greenstone and basalt. That eruptive action is seen in the ravines and precipices of the Blue Mountains near Sydney; in the Grose valley, below Mount Hay and its neighbours, Mount King George and Mount Tomah; but still more remarkably in the mountains of Tasmania, viewed from Ben Lomond, within 30 miles of Launceston. The sedimentary deposits of the first epoch are characterised by the presence of mica slate, and of argillaceous and siliceous slate, as well as by the absence of gneiss. Those of the second epoch are found to be arenaceous, calcareous, or argillaceous stratified deposits. The third epoch includes the coal deposits, with their intervening shales and sandstones, including many fossils; while the fourth and last epoch is marked by the occurrence of elevated peaks, and by the remains of land animals found in the limestone caves or in alluvial deposits.

The Rev. W. B. Clarke, of Sydney, again, in a revised treatise published in 1871, expresses a doubt whether the southern range of mountains, extending to Wilson's Promontory, be really a continuation of the main Cordillera of New South Wales. He rather considers this to be prolonged in a westerly direction, taking a bend that way at the Warragong or Snowy Alps, and to be continued within 60 miles of the border of South Australia, which is on the 141st meridian of E. long. The subject is further discussed by Mr R. Brough Smith, of Melbourne, in his essay of 1872 on the mineralogy and rock formations of Victoria. This geologist has also remarked that the Murray, which must have repeatedly shifted its bed and changed its outlet, may have once been a far more powerful stream, flooding a vast tract of the interior, and thus becoming an effective agent in the geological formations of all south-east Australia. It has produced, in Victoria more especially, the Tertiary stratifications which are equivalent to the Pliocene rocks of Europe.

Throughout the whole of eastern Australia, including New South Wales and Queensland, while no tertiary marine deposits have been found, there occur many remarkable beds of siliceous sandstone, bearing impressions of ferns and leaves of trees, which are referred to the Tertiary epoch. An interesting theory is advanced by Mr Clarke to account for the absence of Tertiary deposits on the eastern coast, when they are found on the western and southern coasts of Australia. In the islands of New Caledonia and other Australasian groups, from the Louisiade, near New Guinea, to New Zealand, there is a repetition of Australian geological formations, and there are abundant Tertiary deposits; and this may confirm the supposition that the Australian continent at some period extended farther to the east, and that a vast portion has disappeared under the ocean. To the same hypothetical cause Mr Darwin ascribes the formation of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching along the east coast from S. lat. 22° 23′ to Torres Strait, with an interval between it and the land varying from 12 to 140 miles.

With regard to the more remote geological epochs, Australia presents fewer materials for study than the other

continents of our globe. Mr Clarke doubts the origin of some of the more ancient slates mentioned in the "first epoch" of Count Strzelecki, and does not find, either in eastern or in southern Australia, sufficient proof that these regions contain azoic and metamorphic rocks. Large masses of granite occur along the coast, and more extensively in Western Australia. Of the lower Palæozoic there is a great deal of Upper Silurian rock in New South Wales and Queensland, and some in Tasmania. It is in the Lower Silurian formation, as Sir Roderick Murchison predicted, that gold deposits are chiefly found. Rocks of the Devonian period are not yet proved to exist anywhere in Australia, and it is doubtful if any true Permian or Trias, so common elsewhere, have been met with in this continent. The great Carboniferous series is very prominent in New South Wales and in parts of Queensland; it prevails less in Victoria. Coal-beds, of thickness varying from 3 feet to 30 feet, are found associated, both above and below, with fossils resembling those of the Carboniferous strata in Ireland. Their antiquity is proved beyond question, in some districts, as in the valley of the Hawkesbury, where they are overlaid with beds of sandstone, shale, and conglomerate, 1000 feet thick. It has been shown by Mr Daintree that there is a very extensive distribution of the Secondary or Mesozoic rocks in Queensland-the Cretaceous strata, both there and in Western Australia, covering a large area. The Oolitic are more abundant in Western Australia.

The great plains of the interior, and the slopes of the inner mountain ranges, consist largely of deposits of the Tertiary epoch. They occupy an immense area in Victoria and New South Wales, including the Riverina district, which was probably, as Mr Brough Smith considers, levelled and planed down by the ancient vast expansion of the Murray. "The waves of the sea," he remarks, "and the waters of this river, have eaten away mountains of granite and great hills of schist in past times, and placed instead of them a smooth covering of sands and clays." The great basin east of Port Phillip, connected with another basin about Westernport, is underlaid with Mesozoic carbonaceous rocks, upper Miocene, a nodular basalt, and decomposed amygdaloid of older volcanic origin, the quartzose drift of the first Pliocene formations, and some volcanic products of more recent date. Here the Miocene beds abound with fossil leaves of plants belonging to that age. The sands, clays, and gravels of later periods, in the ancient beds of the streams within the Silurian areas, are more or less auriferous. Some of the deeper "leads" of the gold-miner contain fossil fruits and the trunks and branches of trees, which are described by Baron von Müller in the Melbourne official reports of the mining surveyors. In the Ballarat gold-fields the auriferous quartzose gravels are overlaid by flows of lava and vesicular volcanic rocks, while in a neighbouring district south of Ballarat, pebbles and sand are cemented by ferruginous matter into an extremely hard conglomerate.

In eastern Australia, where no Tertiary marine deposits are met with, there are deep accumulations of drift, such as transmuted beds of the Carboniferous formation, porphyry, and basalt, and other igneous rocks, and fragments of the older Palæozoic strata. Many of the drift streams are not only highly auriferous, but contain gems of all kinds. Diamonds, though of small size, have been taken from the Cudgegong River, near Mudgee, in New South Wales, and likewise from the Macquarie River.

In the eastern plains of the interior, embedded in black muddy trappean soil, are found the bones of enormous animals of the marsupial or kangaroo order, as well as birds, fishes, and reptiles. The accumulations of bones in caverns at Wellington, New South Wales, and on the rivers Colo, Macleay, and Coodradigbee, are of great interest.

A femur bone of the dinornis, the gigantic extinct bird of | New Zealand, has been discovered in the drift on Peak Downs in eastern Australia, at the depth of 188 feet; and this would lead to the belief that land once existed where now the Pacific Ocean separates by a thousand miles two countries of Australasia, whose present animal and vege table races have so little in common.

Minerals.-The useful and precious metals exist in considerable quantities in each of the five provinces of Australia. New South Wales has abundance of gold, copper, iron, and coal, as well as silver, lead, and tin. The mineral riches of Victoria, though almost confined to gold, have been the main cause of her rapid progress. South Australia possesses the most valuable copper mines. Queensland ranks next to the last-named province for copper, and excels her neighbours in the production of tin, while gold, iron, and coal are also found in considerable quantities. In Western Australia mines of lead, silver, and copper have been opened; and there is much ironstone. The discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria took place in 1851, and during the next twenty years Victoria exported 40,750,000 oz. of the precious metal, while New South Wales, from 1851 to 1871, exported nearly 10,000,000 ounces. The Queensland gold mines, since 1860, have displayed increasing promise; up to the end of 1872 they had yielded rather less than 1,000,000 ounces; but much was expected, at a more recent date, from the Palmer River and other districts of the north. The yearly value of the aggregate gold exports of Australia, on the average of fifteen years, has been £10,000,000. Victoria alone has produced gold to the value of £170,000,000. The alluvial gold-fields, in which the early diggers, with the simplest tools, obtained for a short time large quantities of the coveted ore, seem now to be mostly exhausted. It is in the quartz formations of the mountain ranges, or in those at a great depth underground, reached by the sinking of shafts and regular mining operations, that Australian gold is henceforth to be chiefly procured. There are mines in Victoria 1000 feet deep, as at Clunes, and many others from 300 to 600 feet.

The copper mines of Burra Burra, in South Australia, proved very profitable some twenty-five years ago, yielding in a twelvemonth ore to the value of £350,000, and the Moonta mines, in 1872, were scarcely less productive. The province of South Australia, in that year, exported copper to the amount of £800,000. Queensland, in 1873, produced one-fourth that quantity. Tin, an article of great mercantile interest, is divided between Queensland and New South Wales in a frontier district, two-thirds of the extent of which belongs to the Darling Downs, within the last-mentioned province. There is a little tin, also, in some parts of Victoria. Lead, silver, and cinnabar have been obtained not only in New South Wales, but likewise in Western Australia.

The abundance of good iron ore, in convenient vicinity to thick beds of excellent coal, ensures a future career of manufacturing prosperity to New South Wales, and not less to Queensland. The country north and south of Sydney, and west of that city 100 miles inland to the dividing range of mountains, is all of Carboniferous formation. At the mouth of the Hunter River, from the port and town of Newcastle, coal was exported in 1873 to the value of £1,000,000 sterling. The collieries there taken up have an extent of 35,000 acres, but the area of the coal-field is officially estimated at 10,000,000 acres, and the seams are 9 feet to 11 feet thick. The quality of this coal is said to be equal to that of Great Britain for most furnace purposes, and it is generally used by steamships in the Pacific and Chinese navigation. Next in importance are the Wollongong collieries, south of Sydney, and those of

Hartley, Maitland, and Berrima, now connected by railway with the capital.

In each of the places above named there is iron of a superior quality, the working of which to advantage cannot be long delayed. On the Illawarra coast it is found close to the finest bituminous coal, and to limestone. The iron of New South Wales is mostly hæmatite, and the ironstone contains from 60 to 70 per cent. of ore.

Among other mineral products of the same region are cannel coal and shale yielding kerosene oil. This is a recognised article of export from New South Wales to the other colonies. It is hardly worth while to speak of diamonds, opals, and precious stones, but they are often picked up, though of small size, along the Mudgee and Abercrombie Rivers, and at Beechworth and Daylesford, in Victoria.

"A

Climate. The Australian continent, extending over 28° of latitude, might be expected to show a considerable diversity of climate. In reality, however, it experiences fewer climatic variations than the other great continents, owing to its distance (28°) from the Antarctic circle and (11°) from the equator. There is, besides, a powerful determining cause in the uniform character and undivided extent of its dry interior plain. On this subject Mr Ranken, in his Dominion of Australia, remarks basin having its northern portion in the tropics, it acts like an oven under the daily sun. It becomes daily heated; then its atmosphere expands; but such is its immensity that no sufficient supply of moist sea air from the neighbouring oceans can reach it, to supply the vacancy caused by this expansion. Of an almost perfectly flat surface, there is no play for currents of air upon it; only the heat is daily absorbed and nightly radiated. Such is the heat, that in the summer the soil is more like a fire than an oven; the air, if it moves, is like a furnace-blast; and such its extent and sameness, that as great heat may prevail hundreds of miles south as north of the tropics." This continual radiation of heat is sometimes relieved though not with the regularity of an annual season, indeed rather at uncertain intervals of several years-by the admission of masses of vapour, drawn in from the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. Great masses of clouds, after labouring many months to reach the interior from the sea, succeed in passing over the sea-bound mountains, and spread themselves in floods of rain upon the inland country. The north-west shore, and that of Carpentaria, are favoured with an annual visitation of the monsoons, from December to March, penetrating as far as 500 miles into the continent, where the sands of the desert are driven in wavy heaps by the force of this wind. But South Australia, though it feels a cool sea breeze from the south-west, gets little rain, for lack of any mountain range parallel with the coast to arrest and condense the passing vapours. The yearly rainfall at Adelaide and Gawler is therefore not more than 15 or 20 inches, while at the head of Spencer Gulf it is but 6 or 8. In Victoria and in New South Wales, on the contrary, where a wall of mountain fronts the ocean, most places on the sea-board enjoy a fair allowance of rain. It is 32 inches at Portland, nearly 26 inches at Melbourne; at Sydney and Newcastle, on the east coast, as much as 48 and 44 inches in the year. But at Brisbane, in Queensland, farther north, it amounts to 50 inches; at Rockingham Bay, in latitude 18° S., where the hills are covered with dense forests, the rainfall in 1871 was no less than 90 inches. In every part, however, of this magnificent highland region, the supply of moisture is rapidly diminished by passing inland; so that very little remains to fall on the interior or western slopes of the coast ranges, and to irrigate the interior plains.

With regard to the temperature, the northern regions of the continent being situated within the tropic of Capricorn,

In winter, in New South Wales, the prevalent winds blow from the west, with occasional storms of wind and rain from the eastward; while the autumn months have much cloudy weather, not accompanied by rain. January and February are the hottest months of summer, and July the coldest month of winter.

With regard to the climate of Victoria, Mr Robert Ellery, Government astronomer at Melbourne, in his report of 1872, furnishes exact information. The mean annual temperature at Melbourne during fourteen years was 57°6, and that of the whole province 56° 8, including stations 2000 feet or 1400 feet above the sea-level at Daylesford and Ballarat. This is equivalent to the mean annual temperature of Marseilles and Florence, in the northern hemisphere, but the climate of Melbourne is much more equable than that of the Mediterranean shores. The lowest temperature yet recorded has been 27°, or 5° below the freezing point; the highest, 111° in the shade, occurring during one of the hot winds, called "brickfielders," which, loaded with dust, occasionally blow for a few hours in summer. At Sandhurst, 778 feet above the sea, the greatest extremes of temperature yet observed were 117° and 27°5; at Ballarat the extreme of winter cold was 10° below freezing.

The amount of humidity in the air is liable to great and rapid variations in the summer months. It is sometimes reduced as much as 60 per cent. within a few hours, by the effect of hot dry winds. But this is compensated by an access of moisture upon a change of wind. The annual average rainfall at Melbourne, which for thirty years is stated at 25-66 inches, does not seem less than that of places in similar latitudes in other parts of the world. Yet it proves inadequate, because of the great amount of evaporation, estimated by Professor Neumayer at 42 inches.

The spring season in Victoria, consisting of the months of September, October, and November, is genial and pleasant, with some rain. The summer-December, January, and February-is generally hot and dry, though its first month is sometimes broken by storms of cold wind and heavy rain. In February the north winds assume the character of siroccos, and bush-fires often devastate the grassy plains and forests of the inland country. The autumn months--March, April, and May-are, in general, the most agreeable; and at this season vegetable life is refreshed, and puts forth a growth equal to that of the spring. The winter is June, July, and August, with strong, dry, cold winds from the north, alternating with frequent rain from the opposite quarter; there is little ice or snow, except in the mountain districts.

Botany.-A probable computation of the whole number of distinct vegetable species indigenous to Australia and

the Government botanist at Melbourne. He believes that, omitting the minute fungi, there will not be found above 10,000 species of Australian plants. The standard authority upon this subject, so far as it could be known sixty years ago, but now requiring to be completed and extended, was the Prodromus Flora Nova Hollandia, published in 1810 by Mr Robert Brown of the British Museum. Besides making personal observations from 1802 to 1805, he had classified the collections procured by Sir Joseph Banks when Captain Cook's ship visited the eastern shore. Upon that occasion, in 1769, the name of Botany Bay was given to an inlet near Port Jackson, from the variety of new specimens found there. Baron von Müller's Report of 1857 on the researches made by him alone in the North Australian exploring expedition under Mr Gregory, exhibits 2000 new species, representing more than 800 genera, which belong to 160 different orders. He could discover no new natural order, or fundamental form of the vegetable kingdom, in a minute examination of the flora of Arnhem Land, the country around the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the Victoria River, but 60 genera were found that had not been noticed by any earlier Australian botanist.

The eastern parts of this continent, New South Wales and Queensland, are very much richer, both in their botany and in their zoology, than any other parts of Australia. Much was done here for the former science, half a century ago, by Mr Allan Cunningham, whose monumental obelisk fitly stands in the Botanic Garden at Sydney. In general, the growth of trees on the north and north-west coasts is wanting in size and regularity, compared with their growth in eastern Australia. To the last-mentioned region, for instance, the pines are entirely confined; here the Moreton Bay pine, and Bunya Bunya pine, of the genus Araucaria, growing to 150 feet in height, yield excellent timber. The red cedar, the iron bark, the blue gum-tree, and others useful to the carpenter, belong likewise to the eastern highlands. The Casuarina, or she-oak, is found on the shores of Carpentaria and in the interior, but not on the banks of the Victoria River to the north-west. Of the Eucalyptus, or gum-tree, Australia has 400 species; but the one most uniformly distributed is the Eucalyptus rostrata or acuminata, called the flooded gum-tree; its timber is durable, and takes a fine polish. Rosewood, tulip-wood, sandal-wood, and satin-wood, with other materials for the cabinetmaker's ornamental work, abound in the forests of Queensland. The forest scenery of the more northerly districts, within the tropics, and onwards to Rockingham Bay, is described as of great luxuriance. It consists of many kinds of large umbrageous trees, some of an Indian type, intermixed with noble araucarias, all matted together in an impervious thicket by lianes of the convolvulus, the calamus, and other plants, climbing or pendent, harbouring in their shade many parasitical orchids and ferns. forests overhang the seaward sides of the mountain ranges, where they inhale abundant moisture from the winds of the Pacific Ocean, and feed upon a congenial soil from the decomposition of schistose rocks.

Such

A striking contrast is offered to the view beyond the coast ranges. The interior of Queensland presents either highland downs of basaltic origin, almost bare of trees, but with abundant herbaceous vegetation, good pasture grass, and an immense quantity of vervain, or the Brigalow scrub, merely shrubs and small trees, on a soil of argillaceous sandstone. The sandstone table-lands, again, naked and dry, produce but a few diminutive eucalypti, and sparse tufts of uneatable grasses, while the inland deserts have only the acacia to break the monotony of the scene. The character of the inland flora adds confirmation to the belief that the interior was formerly a marine soil, which