indifferent manner in which they are housed? Small, low, thatched
cottages, in a temperature much too warm for Europeans to labour in
constantly, are apt to engender disease. There is, besides, a mangrove
swamp immediately behind the settlement, which at present decreases its
salubrity. With regard to the range of the thermometer, it has been known
as low as 62 degrees, and it is never so high, by ten or twenty degrees,
as I have seen it in South Australia during the hot winds: the average,
however, is about 83 degrees. The fact that the site of Victoria lies so
far from the entrance of the harbour is injurious to its prosperity, as
it prevents many vessels from calling, and deprives it of the breezes
that constantly prevail on the coast, and would of course conduce to its
healthiness.*

(*Footnote. The following remarks from Mr. Bynoe, on the climate of
Northern Australia, corroborate the views put forward in the text:

I find on a reference to the Medical Journals, as well as to a
Meteorological table kept by me during a period of six years, on the
coasts of Australia, and under every variety of climate, that we had no
diseases peculiar to that continent, and I am led to believe it a
remarkably healthy country. On the North and North-west coasts, where you
find every bight and indentation of land fringed with mangroves,
bordering mud flats, and ledges formed by corallines in every stage of
decomposition, with a high temperature, no fevers or dysenteries were
engendered.

Our ship's company were constantly exposed, in boats, to all the
vicissitudes from wet to dry weather, sleeping in mangrove creeks for
many months in succession, pestered by mosquitoes during the hours of
repose, yet they still remained very healthy; and the only instance where