178 REPORT— 1861. 



ginal inhabitants, and was unpeopled until colonized about 1000 years ago, and this 

 by one of the most highly-guted races of man — the same which twice conquered 

 France and England. 



I take my next illusti'ation from a coimtry of a very different character, Austi-a- 

 lia. The gi'eat mass of this continent lies in a temperate region, with well-marked 

 seasons, and the rest in a tropical one. The climate of that portion of it which has 

 been tested is one of the finest in the world, and the land is not encumbered ■sv-ith 

 forest, always so formidable an obstacle to the early advancement of civilization. 

 With these exceptions it possesses no peculiar advantages : it has no great range of 

 high moimtains, and hence no great navigable rivers, while, from the same cause, 

 a vast extent of its sm-face is an arid desert of sand. Compared to its area, it has 

 •but a small extent of coast-line, because little indented by gulfs, bays, or inlets, and 

 hence it is wanting in facUity of intercommunication. It contained no native plant 

 available to cultivation for human food, and no native animal amenable to domes- 

 tication, the dog excepted, of small value iu such a climate. Under such dis- 

 couragements, and without communication with strangers, any advancement iu 

 civilization woidd have been impossible, even had its native inhabitants been of 

 the most highly-gifted races of man. Mentally and physically they are, on the 

 contrary, among the feeblest, consisting of hordes of black, ill-formed, unseemly 

 naked savages, possessed of no aiis, except those which enabled them to maintain 

 a bare existence from the spontaneous productions of the earth or the water. 



Equal in extent to China, the whole population of Austi-alia did not, probably, 

 exceed in number that of a single town in that empire. Little more than seventy 

 years ago this distant and unpromising land was selected as a place of pimishment 

 for English felons ; in due time it was found excellently well adapted for the sheep, 

 although no native animal of the family it belongs to existed in it, and chiefly by 

 its help the population of the sti'angers rose to half a million. Ten years ago it 

 was found to be rich in gold, a fact which the natives had not discovered ; and if 

 they had, the precious metal woidd have been of no more value to them than the 

 quartz rock which contains it. The gold has doubled the ci^-ilized population, and, 

 with the wool of the sheep, is exported, to the enrichment of the colonists and the 

 world at large, to the yearly value of fifteen millions. At even less than its recent 

 rate of increase, Australia will, in a centiu-y's time, contain a population equal to 

 that of the United Kingdom, — a wealthy, proud, and formidable nation of Anglo- 

 Saxons— mighty conquerors and troublesome neighbours. 



The ti'opical Andaman Islands, iu the Gulf of Bengal, are an example of a land 

 even more inauspicious than Australia itself. With the exception of external form 

 and of climate, not, however, specially favom-able, eA^ery other condition indispen- 

 sable to human progress seems here wanting. It produces no plants fit for human 

 food, and not one animal amenable to domestication — except, perhaps, the hog ; 

 indeed, with the exception of these and of apes and reptiles, hardly any large 

 animals at all. The aborigines are a small, feeble race of black negroes, in phy- 

 sical form much below even the impromising Australians. In the same Southern 

 Hemisphere with Austi-alia lies a land of less extent, but of far higher attributes 

 than Australia, New Zealand. The two islands which mainly compose it lie within 

 the similar latitiules with Italy, Greece, and the Archipelago. The soil is fertile, 

 and high mountains secm-e a perennial supply of water. With these natural advan- 

 tages, however, they possessed when discovered no native plant amenable to culti- 

 vation, or animal capable of domestication ; for the yam, the batata, and the taro 

 were imported exotics ; and the dog — for want of suitable food, small and few — 

 also an imported stranger. The inhabitants themselves were emigrants fi-om the 

 intertropical isles of the Pacific, as attested by the identity of their physical form 

 and language with those of these islands. For lack of animal food — for they had 

 desti'oyed the gigantic stnithious bu-ds of their country before they were kno-wn to 

 Em-opeans — the New Zealanders betook themselves to eating one another, and were 

 the most open and avowed cannibals on record. They would have been even more 

 abject savages than they were, had thev not brought with them the above-named 

 cultivated plants. Notwithstanding this, our experience of the New Zealanders 

 has shown them to possess more courage and capacity than Europeans have ever 

 found in any other wild race. In these qualities they are a conti-ast to the feeble 

 and effeminate people of the tropic? from whom they sprong— a difPorence of cha- 



