28 PREVENTION OR MITIGATION OF DROUGHTS IN AUSTRALIA. 
aided us in understanding the subject by issuing one or more volumes, 
and there are few eminent botanists who have not given us the benefit 
of their experience in this branch of study. The success which the 
Ferns achieved was the greatest triumph of flowerless plants over flowers 
ever recorded. It was the commencement of a rage for fine foliage 
plants, as gardeners call them, of that phyllomania now spreading 
through the length and breadth of Europe. All plants with variegated 
leaves became much sought after. A species which would not be 
looked at if preserving the natural green of its foliage, became at once 
an object of interest if labouring under a kind of albinism so as to make 
it appear mottled. But white and green was not enough to cause 
variety ; the eye wanted more; and during the last few years the 
whole of the globe, inhabited and uninhabited, has been searched for 
plants with leaves having more than two colours,—if possible, all 
those of the rainbow. The search has been productive beyond expec- 
tation, and we have now in our Caladiums, Arums, Begonias, Marantas, 
Cannas, and others, an endless series of these favourites. The latest 
development of phyllomania seems to be decidedly towards large and 
hard-leaved plants; all that are soft and weedy are to be cast aside. 
Here horticulture has lit upon inexhaustible stores, and amongst them 
the most majestic of all known plants, the great Palm tribe. 
THE PREVENTION OR MITIGATION OF DROUGHTS IN 
AUSTRALIA. 
. When reading the appalling accounts of the long droughts in the 
desert districts of Australia, we are ever led to reflect by what mea- 
sures they might be alleviated or obviated. On more than one oc- 
casion I have pointed out that the wide dissemination of trees in the 
arid parts of the interior would exercise a beneficial effect on the 
increase of rain, on the retention of humidity, 
of burning winds. For the purpose of raising timber on shadeless 
barren wastes, perhaps no country possesses greater facilities than 
Australia, inasmuch as some of our trees would seem to surpass those 
of any other country in celerity of growth, and in power to resist the 
dry heat of our summer season, I am sure that if in the extensive 
sheep-runs now visited by the drought the Cape Wattle (the West 
Australian Acacia Lophantha), the ordinary Wattle-tree of Victoria 
and on the mitigation 
