THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 



cast the unprofitable servant into the outer lake, where, lo and behold, the following 

 year, it clothed its mirrored surface with a sheet of exquisite amethystine blossoms. 

 Such, as the Poet Moralist has written, are the " sweet uses of adversity." 



Queensland is the scene of the plant figured in the upper sub-division of Plate L. 

 The species, Beaumonlia grandijlora, is one of the many favorite creepers acclimatised 

 in the Brisbane Gardens. The flowers are trumpet-shaped, as white and as large as 

 virgin lilies, while the plant forms festoons or a network of rope-like stems and dark 

 glossy leaves that may cover, as here shown, yards of space or traverse the whole length 

 of a paddock fence. They and innumerable other garden beauties, many of them photo- 

 graphically recorded, and including such forms as huge bushes of Frangipani (Plumiera), 

 Franciscea, Bougainvilleas, Hibiscus, Pomegranate, Bauhinia, Allamandas, Stephanotis, 

 Antigonon, and a host of other English hothouse types, all growing out of doors in 

 rampant luxuriance, beside English Roses, Camelias, and all the ordinary garden 

 plants, are to the writer among the happy memories of the Queensland bungalow and 

 garden paradise he occupied there a few years since. Such an Eden had necessarily 

 also its quota of luscious fruits in equally bewildering variety. Pineapples, Mangoes, 

 Bananas, Persimmons, Passion-fruit, Granidella, Grapes, Peaches, the sweetmeat-like 

 Monstera deliciosa, and, to crown all, English Strawberries, yielded a dessert menu 

 scarcely to be despised. Is it to be wondered at that emigrants of, it may be, but a 

 few years' standing only to Australia's prolific soil and sunny clime, find it difficult to 

 rehabilitate themselves contentedly amidst the grudgingly responsive fallows, predom- 

 inating fogs, and murky skies of their native land? 



The concluding border illustration to this Chapter affords a glimpse of the 

 manner in which tree-ferns are wont to grow in Australia. The upper figure depicts 

 a sheltered nook in the Brisbane, Queensland, Botanic Gardens, wherein they have been 

 artificially introduced in company with a mingled variety of tropical vegetation. A 

 closely identical picture, except for the presence of the banana-like Strelitzia and the 

 artificial foreground, is presented by a photograph taken by the writer in the natural 

 scrub in the vicinity of the Barron Falls, North Queensland. Tree-ferns in their 

 fullest state of development must undoubtedly, however, be sought for in the southern 

 island-colony of Tasmania, where, more especially on the moisture-laiden flanks of 

 Mount Wellington, they grow in the greatest luxuriance. A fern-grown area in this 

 notable locality is portrayed by the lower of the two photographs reproduced. The 

 typical Tasmanian Tree-fern, Dicsonia antarctica, occupies the greater portion of the field, 

 growing so thickly that their tree-like trunks are for the most part concealed from 



