SOME DIFFERENCES 79 



natural conditions of certain portions of the Commonwealth 

 as to leave no room to doubt the present duty. We are 

 continually making mutually beneficial discoveries, and 

 may it be granted these efforts be blessed with happy 

 purpose. All is not known yet even in Australia, The 

 number of "observers" who believe that snakes swallow 

 their young in time of danger, and allow them to emerge 

 when it is past, and that the end of the death adder to 

 avoid is the tail, which is fitted with a slightly curved spur, 

 become fewer every year ; but we are still sincere in many 

 of the honourable points of ignorance. Some discredit such 

 facts as climbing fish, oysters "growing" on living trees, 

 birds hatching eggs without sitting on them, egg-laying 

 mammals and mammals producing young from eggs 

 hatched within their bodies, plants that sow the seed of 

 continents to be — ^yet these facts are of everyday occur- 

 rence here. 



As to climate, will general credence be given to the 

 statement that Dunk Island is more "temperate" than 

 Melbourne ? We experience neither the extreme heat nor 

 the extreme cold of the metropolis of Victoria — nearly 

 2000 miles to the south ; we have four or five times the 

 volume of rain, yet a greater number of fine days — days 

 without rain. The general principle that where the rainy 

 days are fewest the amount of rain is greatest, is apt to be 

 forgotten. During 1903 the rainfall of Dunk Island 

 amounted to 153 inches. What is meant (to follow the 

 phrase of Huxley) when one says in technical language that 

 the rainfall of a place was 153 inches for a certain year? 

 Such a statement means simply that if all the rain which 

 fell on any level piece of ground in that place could be 

 collected — none being lost by drying up, none running off 

 the soil, and none soaking into it — then at the end of the 

 year it would form a layer covering that piece of ground to 

 the uniform depth of 12 feet 9 inches! An inch of rain 

 signifies 1 14 tons, or 27,000 gallons per acre ! 



Let me repeat that in 1903 the rainfall here totalled 

 153 inches. During the same period the mean rainfall of 



