plants peculiarly its own. It has been said that of 5,710 plants
discovered, 5,440 are peculiar to that continent. The kangaroo also is
proper to Australia, and there are other animals of like kind. Of 58
species of quadruped found in Australia, 46 were peculiar to it. Sheep
and cattle that abound there now were introduced from Europe. From eight
merino sheep introduced in 1793 by a settler named McArthur, there has
been multiplication into millions, and the food-store of the Old World
begins to be replenished by Australian mutton.

The unexplored interior has given a happy hunting-ground to satisfy the
British spirit of adventure and research; but large waterless tracts,
that baffle man's ingenuity, have put man's powers of endurance to sore
trial.

The mountains of Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there
are either no fossil traces of past life, or the traces are of life in
the most ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the
Ural range, which he had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick
Murchison, in 1844, to predict that gold would be found in Australia. The
first finding of gold--the beginning of the history of the Australian
gold-fields--was in February, 1851, near Bathurst and Wellington, and to-
day looks back to the morning of yesterday in the name of Ophir, given to
the Bathurst gold-diggings.

Gold, wool, mutton, wine, fruits, and what more Australia can now add to
the commonwealth of the English-speaking people, Englishmen at home have
been learning this year in the great Indian and Colonial Exhibition,
which is to stand always as evidence of the numerous resources of the
Empire, as aid to the full knowledge of them, and through that to their
wide diffusion. We are a long way now from the wrecked ship of Captain