288 ELEMENTS OF GENERAL SCIENCE 



lay in enormous piles against obstructions they had frantically 

 and vainly striven to climb, and poisoned grain and fruit have 

 killed myriads more. A fortune of X 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 the various colonial governments some 

 very original devices. 



"Another great pest to the settlers is developing in the 

 foxes, two of which were imported from Cumberland some 

 years ago by a wealthy station owner, who thought that they 

 might breed and give himself and friends an occasional day 

 with hounds. His modest desires were soon met in the devel- 

 opment 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 memory of Wallace and Bruce, and in New Zea- 

 land the blocking up of rivers by the English water cress, 

 which in its new home grows a dozen feet in length and has 

 to be dredged out to keep navigation open, it may be under- 

 stood the colonials look with jaundiced eye upon suggestions 

 of any further interference 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 in- 

 digenous birds by the gun and by poisoned grain strewn for 

 rabbits has facilitated its increase. The devastation caused by 

 these insects last year was enormous, and befell a district a 

 thousand miles long and two thousand miles wide. For days 

 they passed in clouds that darkened the sky with the gloomy 

 hue of an eclipse, while the ground was covered with crawling 



