PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



A BUREAU OF BIOLOGICAL SURVEY. 

 Walter W. Froggatt, F.L.S. 



The question of establishing a Bureau of Biological Survey or a Bureau of 

 Economic Zoology is one that should appeal to all good Australians. In our great 

 island continent we have what we might call a prehistoric fauna, the living repre- 

 sentatives of the earlier types of mammals and other creatures which once popu- 

 lated the whole of the earth's surface. 



Ages ago they vanished from the old world, where evolution has produced the 

 present fauna, and the marsupials and monotrenies are only represented by their 

 fragmentary remains in the fossiliferous rocks. Into such a fauna, unaltered 

 throughout ages of isolation, we can imagine what a change in the balance of 

 nature could be wrought by man, with his accompaniment of the more highly de- 

 veloped forms of life. 



Two great factors which were conducive to that stationary existence of our 

 prehistoric fauna here were, first, the early disappearance of the large marsupial 

 carnivora, Thylacoleo camifex, and Sarcophilus prior; and, secondly, the only 

 modern advent of our aboriginals, who, too, made no appreciable alteration. The 

 aboriginals were not cultivators, maybe on account of the arid conditions of our 

 continent which faced the original founders who landed on our northern coast. 

 This trait prevented them from becoming a big population. 



Despite the prophecies of our naturalists of fifty years ago — Dr. Bennett, 

 Gould, and others — that all our large kangaroos, emus, and other large birds would 

 be extinct in a few years, we find that, up to the present time, there has been little 

 danger of the kangaroos and other animals and birds that range over the whole 

 of Australia becoming extinct when afforded adequate protection. 



In the west, away from the railway lines, kangaroos and emus are still 

 plentiful, too plentiful the station owners claim. We frequently read reports from 

 Pastures Protection Boards, asking that the local protection of marsupials be lifted 

 for a month or more on account of the excessive increase of kangaroos. At Yar 

 rawin, near Brewarrina, the men mustering in one of the paddocks near the Gov- 

 ernment Sheep Fly Experiment Station, in the summer of 1914. found 48 emu 

 nests, and they were nesting also all over the run. 



Aboriginals, the dingo, and periodical droughts were the natural checks. 

 When the natives vanished, and when the dingos were hunted and poisoned, and 

 when the survivors found lambs much easier to catch than kangaroos, such num- 

 bers of kangaroos appeared that a Marsupial Bill was brought into force in 

 Queensland . In the last decade these conditions have again altered . Fresh set - 

 tlement is pushing out on all sides toward the centre of Australia, and new and 

 improved methods of destruction now threaten our unique fauna. 



The subdivision of the land with wire-netted fences and rabbit-pit traps cause 

 the death of scores of porcupine anteaters (Echidna). T have seen a dozen of 

 these harmless creatures killed at one trap on the Barwon River; and between two 



