348 Miscellanea. 
manners and habits of the colonists and natives, as recently published 
in the “ Antipodes” of Colonel Mundy, who makes the life of an accom- 
plished soldier in Australia or New Zealand familiar to every one. 
An instructive statistical work on Australia has been published by 
Mr. Melville, during many years a resident in different parts of that great 
country. 
Though less read by the public, the work of Mr. Macgillivray, the 
naturalist of the expedition under our lamented associate the late Captain 
Owen Stanley, is one of deep interest to the ethnologist, and bids us hope 
for excellent results on the return of the expedition recently detached to 
the South Pacific under Captain Denham, and to which our member Mr. 
Macgillivray is appointed. 
This author has shown that, whilst the Australians are nearly in the 
lowest possible grade of human existence, they have languages more com- 
plex than any of modern Europe; these can only have been developed in 
a long succession of ages. His sketches of the distinctive characters of 
the different peoples which the expedition visited, whether Malays, Papuans, 
or Australians, are drawn with simplicity, truthfulness, and power. 
Gold Produce of Australia.—When I first occupied this chair in 1844, 
and announced to you a then forthcoming work of my distinguished friend 
Count Strzelecki, whose collections of rocks, fossils, and whose detailed 
maps I had examined, I drew your attention to the remarkable coincidence 
between the structure of the great eastern chain of Australia, which I 
termed the “ Cordillera” of that continent, and that of the auriferous Ural 
mountains, from which I had recently returned, remarking that ‘“ as yet no 
gold had been discovered in our Australian colonies.” That comparison 
produced, it appears, however, some fruits; for in the year 1846, small 
specimens of gold in quartz rock having been sent from New South Wales, 
as resulting from what I had written, I at once urged the unemployed 
Cornish miners, who were about to emigrate, to prefer that colony, and 
there seek for gold in the débris of the older rocks of that region. This 
exhortation, which was printed in the Penzance newspapers, October, 1846, 
and also in the “ Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Corn- 
wall,” caused, I was told, a sensation in Sydney, and set other individuals 
to search after the precious metal; and in 1848 I received letters, dated 
1847, from persons in Sydney and Adelaide quite unknown to me, who 
stated that they had detected gold, and that they knew where they could 
find much more, provided the Government would modify the mining laws, 
and render it worth the while of speculators really to open out mines. 
Indeed, Colonel Helmersen, my associate in the Academy of St. Peters- 
burgh, writing to me in 1846, and unaware of what I had previously printed 
in 1844, also compared the Australian rocks with those of the Ural. He 
further urged me to draw the attention of the Government of New South 
Wales to the probability of finding gold in the alluvia of that country; but 
although I then expressed my opinion very decisively in Cornwall and 
elsewhere, I did not feel myself entitled to addvess the Government until 
