THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 21 
to be based on too slender a foundation. With quick eye he gathers 
together the general features of the vegetation, the vertically-placed 
leaves with consequent absence of shade and presence of grass, and 
the “desolate and untidy appearance of some Euealypts with bark 
hanging in long shreds and swinging about in the wind.” He then 
enters upon an argument on the relative beauty of evergreen and 
deciduous foliage. He considers that the appetite for the exquisite 
greenery of the Northern Spring compensates for having to gaze on 
“‘the land covered for so many months with mere naked skeletons of 
trees.’ The inhabitant of the Tropics gazes with sated eyes on 
uninterrupted gorgeousness. The rest of the argument is suppressed, 
but it would seem to have been an a fortiori. If the people in the 
Tropics are worse off than the English, how much more the people 
in this gum-clad Australia. Darwin could have known nothing 
personally of the outburst of beauty we too enjoy in Spring. 
In this up-country journey, Darwin met two parties of aborigines. 
He naturally comments on their already scant numbers, and discusses 
the causes of destruction. It is interesting to find him pondering 
over the mystery of infection in days long before the germ-theory 
of zymotie diseases had been broached. He comes to the 
conclusion that ‘the effluvium of one set of men shut up together 
for a time may be poisonous when inhaled by others, especially 
perhaps if of different races.” Contact alone, he indicates, may be 
enough to introduce most virulent disease in the weaker race, 
while the stronger does not even show symptoms of the disorder. 
He quotes Dr. Macculloch, who says, “it is asserted that on the 
arrival of a stranger (at St. Kilda), all the inhabitants in the 
common phraseology catch a cold.” And though Macculloch 
considers all this as ludicrous, Darwin thinks it impossible that such 
a belief, (found to exist also at Tahiti and the Chatham Islands), 
should have become universal without some good foundation. It 
would be, I think, a novel and a valuable application of our recently 
acquired knowledge, to consider the many strange results of the 
mere contact of different races in the past, in the light of the modern 
theories of germ-dispersion. 
Darwin is as hard on the scenery as on the capital of the sister 
colony. He says, “from so grand a title as Blue Mountains, and 
from their absolute altitude, I expected to have seen a bold chain of 
mountains crossing the country, but instead of this, a sloping plain 
presents merely an inconsiderable front to the lowland near the 
coast.” And “once on the sandstone platform, the scenery becomes 
exceedingly monotonous.” 
He is, however, able to find food for speculation in the great 
cliff-bordered valleys, almost as famous a geological puzzle as the 
parallel roads of Glenroy. Darwin assigns to them after much 
deliberation a marine origin. In fact, a Port Phillip—though of 
