AUSTRALIAN SCENES AND ADVENTURES.

TWO PAPERS.--1.


Australia is still the world's latest wonder--a land whose very
existence was but a few years ago ignored by geographers, but which
they now acknowledge as a fifth continent; a land of marvels that
courts and repays the investigation of the curious by its wild
scenery, its strange aboriginal inhabitants, its birds and beasts
unlike all others, its rich floral treasures, its mines of
inexhaustible wealth, its meadows and plains of dimensions so vast as
to defy for centuries to come a general cultivation; a land that has
in less than half a century experienced a growth and expansion
unprecedented in the history of nations. Yet is the civilization an
imported one, not indigenous, and to be traced only here and there in
the colonies, having as yet scarcely touched the interior of the
island or its aboriginal inhabitants. These are, in our own day,
hardly less untamed and untamable than when visited by the great
adventurer William Dampier in the latter part of the seventeenth
century, now almost two hundred years ago. So little regard was paid
to the reports of Dampier that nearly another century elapsed without
further efforts at the exploration of Australia, till in 1770 Cook, in
his first voyage around the world, visited this great island,
furnishing to his country the first accurate information of its
climate, soil and productions. Yet his marvelous accounts, though
exciting at first a sort of nine days' wonder, failed to awaken any