52 ; JAMES BACKHOUSE. 
religious body to which he belonged, often travelling from home fo 
religious work, at first principally through the thinly-populated agri- 
cultural parts of Yorkshire and the neighbouring counties. In 1831 
he undertook an extensive missionary tour, in company with a com- 
panion, which occupied him altogether more than ten years. First 
they visited Australia, where they remained seven years. The scope 
of their journey, as he explains in his published account of it, was pri- . 
marily to preach everywhere where there was an opportunity amongst 
the colonists and convicts ; to visit the penal settlements, gaols, schools, 
and other publie institutions, to see in what state they were, and what 
improvements they needed, to do all that lay in their power to ad- 
vocate a humane treatment of the residue of the aborigines, and to 
promote the spread of teetotalism. The greater part of the seven 
years they spent in Tasmania and New South Wales, and then they 
visited Western Australia and Mauritius, and sailed for the Cape Colony, 
where they remained for three years, in the course of which they visited 
all the towns, and the villages and missionary stations in the interior, 
as far as Namaqua Land and the Orauge River, travelling upwards of 
six thousand miles in wagons and on horseback. It would be alto- 
gether beyond our scope here to enter cn any details of the way in 
which the travellers fulfilled the objects of their mission. Three large 
octavo volumes, amounting in aggregate to not less than two thousand 
pages, coutain a complete account of what they saw and did, and what 
they attempted to do,—one devoted to Australia, the other to the Cape 
Colony, and the third to a biography of his companion in travel, which 
Mr. Backhouse wrote after the death of the latter, not many years 
ago. Suffice it to say, that with regard to penal discipline they gave 
their warm adhesion to the plans for its amelioration with which the 
names of Captain Maconochie and Sir John Franklin (who was then 
governor of Van Diemen’s Land) are connected, and that a temperance 
society in Tasmania and a school for poor children, which they origi- 
nated in Cape Town, still, after the lapse of nearly thirty years, remain 
in active operation, the latter supported by funds sent out annually 
from England. Of what Mr. Backhouse did for botany during his 
expedition, we cannot give a better idea than by a quotation from the 
introductory essay to Dr. Hooker’s * Flora Tasmanica,’ and may adduce 
also the testimony of the gentleman to whose labours in the field that 
magnificent work was more than to those of any one else indebted. 
