204 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
grain and fruit have killed myriads more. A fortune of 
425,000 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 to the notice of the various colonial govern- 
ments some very original devices. 
“ Another great pest to the squatters is developing 
in the foxes, two of which were imported from Cumber- 
land some years ago by a wealthy station owner, who 
thought that they might breed, and give himself and 
friends an occasional day with the hounds. His modest 
desires were soon met in the development 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 memories of Wallace and 
Bruce; the well-nigh resistless inroads of furze; and, in 
New Zealand, the blocking up of rivers by the English 
watercress, which in its new home grows a dozen feet 
in length, and has to be dredged out to keep navigation 
open, it may be understood that colonials look with 
jaundiced eye upon suggestions of any further interfer- 
ence 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 indigenous birds by the gun and by 
poisoned grain strewn for rabbits has facilitated its in- 
crease. The devastation caused by these insects last 
year was enormous, and befell a district a thousand 
