204 



FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 



grain and fruit have killed myriads more. A fortune of 

 ^25,000 offered by the New South Wales Government 

 still awaits the man who can invent some means of 

 general destruction, and the knowledge of this fact has 

 brought to the notice of the various colonial govern- 

 ments some very original devices. 



" Another great pest to the squatters is developing 

 in the foxes, two of which were 'imported from Cumber- 

 land some years ago by a wealthy station owner, who 

 thought that they might breed, and give himself and 

 friends an occasional day with the hounds. His modest 

 desires were soon met in the development of a race of 

 foxes far surpassing the English variety in strength and 

 aggressiveness, which not only devour many sheep, but 

 out of pure depravity worry and kill ten times as many 

 as they can eat. When to these plagues is added the 

 ruin of thousands of acres from the spread of the 

 thistle, which a canny Scot brought from the Highlands 

 to keep alive in his breast the memories of Wallace and 

 Bruce; the well-nigh resistless inroads of furze; and, in 

 New Zealand, the blocking up of rivers by the English 

 watercress, which in its new home grows a dozen feet 

 in length, and has to be dredged out to keep navigation 

 open, it may be understood that colonials look with 

 jaundiced eye upon suggestions of any further interfer- 

 ence with Australian nature. 



" Not to be outdone by foreign importations, the 

 country itself has shown in the humble locust a nuisance 

 quite as potent as rabbit, fox, or thistle. This bane of 

 all men who pasture sheep on grass has not been much 

 in evidence until within the last few years, when the 

 great destruction of indigenous birds by the gun and by 

 poisoned grain strewn for rabbits has facilitated its in- 

 crease. The devastation caused by these insects last 

 year was enormous, and befell a district a thousand 



