22 president's address. 



18,000 a year. In New Zealand, where our opossums have 

 been introduced and liberated only a few years ago, they 

 have bred so quickly, free from all enemies, that they are 

 now looked upon as a pest. 



The emu, about which so much has been written as a 

 vanishing bird, with a partial protection is more plentiful 

 now in many inland districts, than it was when the natives 

 caught the young birds in the long grass, hunted for the eggs, 

 and would hide all day on the edge of a water-hole to kill 

 them when drinking. Under the same conditions, we seldom 

 saw a cassowary in the Cairns scrubs, in North Queensland, 

 in 1880, when the blacks were numerous; but six years later, 

 when I hunted over the same ground, they were quite com- 

 mon, because there were no blacks. 



The next important change brought about in new country 

 by stocking, was the hardening of the surface of the soil, the 

 eating-off of the rough grass, and the consequent improvement 

 of the pasturage. This is known to every stockman, and I 

 had a striking example brought under my notice on the 

 King's Sound Pastoral Company's station in North-West 

 Australia, where, in the midst of about two million acres of 

 unstocked land, there was a fenced-in paddock of about ten 

 thousand acres, upon which the station sheep were depas- 

 tured. Within three years, the enclosed land, though very lightly 

 stocked, was transformed into a different and better class of 

 country from that outside the ring-fence, which was poor and 

 thinly grassed. 



The original condition of the greater part of the sheep and 

 cattle lands before stocking, was loose, friable soil, black 

 loam, or sand ridges covered with scattered tufts of grass and 

 herbage. This land, in the dry season, opened out in great 

 cracks and fissures, or became loose, shifting sand, under the 

 influence of summer sun and wind-storms. This was changed 

 again, under the action of the fierce winter rains, into a quag- 

 mire, over which even the kangaroo found it difficult to travel. 

 The carts and drays of the pioneers travelling over the road- 



