20 
dark grey, and wherever limestone or a loamy subsoil underlays the 
sand at a small depth, and where the ground is moist, there vines 
and stone-fruit trees grow well when liberally manured. 
Swamps. 
Many swamps occur through these sandy patches where rushes, 
the “Paper bark” (Melaleuca lewcadendron, Linné), and ti-trees 
abound. These swamys can generally be drained, and when thus 
reclaimed can be turned into market gardens of great fertility. In 
many instances, especially along the coast, the soil is made of an 
accumulation of silt, mud, and vegetable detritus, which settling in 
the water collected in basins bottomed by calcareous hardpans, form 
a rich black mould. 
These hardpans consist of a conglomerate of greyish mud in 
which are thickly embedded fragments of sea-shells, and which after 
being subjected to the process of weathering, crumble down readily 
and assume the normal condition of a soil rich in lime, phosphates, 
potash, and organic matter. They prevent the penetration into the 
deeper soil of roots as well as of water, and their breaking up prior 
to the cultivation of those marshes is necessary wherever they occur 
close up to the surface. The pick or the crowbar readily breaks 
them up into lumps or slabs, but should they be found at a greater 
depth, one of the readiest and at the same time cheapest ways of 
breaking them up is by blasting with explosives, which so shatter 
and erack the hardpan that not only can roots penetrate through 
the clefts, but the stagnant water also sinks by gravitation, and the 
land is generally drained to such an extent that it gradually softens 
and crumbles down until ultimately the hardpan completely disap- 
pears. Where fruit-trees have already been planted without break- 
ing up this hardpan they sooner or later, whenever their roots reach 
the retentive hardpan, languish and flag; in such cases one or two 
cartridges of dynamite exploded on each side of the tree in the win- 
ter time when it it dormant will, without injuring the tree, remove 
the obstruction and bring relief. 
Fertilisers and manures will be necessary for the production of 
paying crops in sandy soils, z.e., field peas well manured and 
ploughed in when in blossom. 
Having been intermixed more or less, these several typical soils 
of the South-West division of Western Australia give rise to a 
greater variety of soils, some of which, like those of a sedimentary 
nature, occur along the course of existing or old river beds, usually 
deep, well drained, and fertile. 
RING-BARKING AND CLEARING LAND. 
Mr. L. Lindley-Cowen, late secretary of the then Bureau, now 
Department of Agriculture, thus summarises in this chapter the 
practice and the opinion of experienced settlers from various parts 
of the agricultural districts of this State:—“To new-comers unac- 
