304 MAN AND NATURE. 



time. Some more ambiguous gifts, it is true as the 

 rat, the mouse, the Hessian fly, &c. have been carried 

 in man's train, unconsciously to himself; while to repay 

 these inflictions America has recently bestowed upon 

 us a water-weed, which chokes many of our canals and 

 smaller streams by its rapid and irrepressible growth. 



Though with less present magnitude of results, all 

 we have said of human agency in the peopling of 

 America with new animals and plants is still more 

 strikingly exemplified in the yet newer continent of 

 Australia. This insulated region, before it began under 

 the auspices of England its rapid career towards 

 Southern empire, presented to the naturalist anomalies 

 so strange and perplexing as well to justify the expres- 

 sion of Cuvier, that it seemed like ' a portion struck off 

 from some other planet.' With slender affinity even 

 in the types of animal and vegetable life, all particular 

 species, with scarcely an exception, differed from those 

 of the older world, and not a single animal existed 

 there capable of being usefully domesticated. During 

 the seventy-six years which have elapsed since English 

 enterprise first directed itself to Australia, the face of 

 the colonised part of this country has undergone a 

 change marvellous in kind and degree. English trees, 

 fruits, cereals, and grasses, despite the inversion of 

 seasons in the transit, have flourished and propagated 

 abundantly in their new abode ; while the variety of 

 climate in this great Southern land has allowed the 

 introduction of several tropical plants, promising much 

 to its future prosperity. Mr. Marsh asserts, in one 

 passage of his book, that the wild plant is much hardier 



