1042 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 
and Victoria. These natives of recognised leprosy-areas were in 
small proportion to the rest of the population, if the Chinese (of 
whom further mention will be made below) be excepted, and no 
occurrence of lepra among them has been recorded. The total 
population of Australia at the date at which the various territories 
were granted responsible government was not so much as 500,000; 
at the present day it is about 4,000,000. 
The conditions of life in this country are extremely favourable 
to health. The earliest settlers no doubt endured similar hard- 
ships to those necessarily suffered by explorers in later years, 
for they were themselves in the position of explorers ; but, with- 
out going into detail, it is indisputable that the conditions of the 
population as a whole, and in every territory, has been and still 
is one of ease. Food, which continued to be of precisely the 
same kinds as they had been accustomed to in England, was 
always wholesome and sufficient, even when it was not plentiful. 
There is no malaria in any of those parts of Australia, which, 
thus far, have become populous, the exception being the very 
sparsely inhabited north. Lastly, the climate, speaking generally, 
is as good as can be imagined; and while the temperature 
necessarily varies greatly between parallels of south latitude so 
widely separated as are the 44th and the 11th, it is in every 
inhabited part such as encourages outdoor habits of life. Nothing 
at all is traceable in the circumstances of life in Australia such 
as possibly might have importance in relation to occurrences of 
lepra. 
In 1851, this healthy, small, and widely scattered population 
was composed i in the main of Europeans, and chiefly of English. 
The aboriginals retired before them, and died apparently almost 
in proportion to the degree in which they were forced into close 
contact with the whites; they never were either of importance 
as enemies, or of use as servants. Besides the aboriginals there 
was of course among the whites, even at that date, quite a small 
proportion of persons belonging to the miscellaneous nationalities 
of which representatives are ‘to be found in ev ery port. There 
is some statistical evidence that they were, at some points, 
numerous enough to be separately counted at the censuses, and yet 
they were in quite inappreciable proportion to the total popula- 
tion; but in the year named the discovery of gold caused an 
influx of large numbers of Chinese. Towards the end of that 
decade there were no less than 42,000 of them in Victoria, and 
in 1861 there were 12,000 in New South Wales. In 1881 the 
numbers in both of these, the richest and most populous terri- 
tories of Australia, became about equal, and were about 10,000. 
Chinese appeared also, though in far less numbers, in all the other 
territories ; but it is not possible to ascertain when they first 
appeared, and at what rate they increased (at least during earlier 
ra Pith Salggeeg- sok a 
