42 



most valuable products which almost every one acknowledges to be 

 valuable, such as hemp, flax, olives, mulberries, &c, but which are 

 kept waiting for years solely on account of the dearness of labour. 

 The agricultural training above recommended would supply this 

 labour. Even a wealthy individual might reasonably object to risk 

 and lose £500 in an experiment intended only for his country's 

 benefit, but such a loss once in a way would not matter much to an 

 establishment supported by the nation. This especially applies to 

 the new industry with which I am best acquainted, and therefore 

 naturally prefer to touch on, the cultivation of silk. The stumbling- 

 block to Australia growing silk in immense quantities has been, and 

 is, the utterly baseless belief that it requires an unusal quantity of 

 specially trained labour. I call this idea utterly baseless, and so 

 says Sir John Young at Sydney, whose practical experience as 

 Governor of the Ionian Islands has been unusually large. He says : 

 " It is a product which involves very little labour ; it is committed 

 to young people and to females ; in fact the girls of the villages look 

 upon silk as their own peculiar province, and as given them for their 

 own profit and for their own dress. It only occupies 35 or 40 days' 

 labour in the course of the year ; and as it is carried on in buildings, 

 it is not exposed to the climate in the same way that many other 

 kinds of cultivation are." A production which occupies only 35 

 days in the year, and is worked by young girls, certainly should not 

 be excluded from Australia on the score of dearness of labour. But 

 at any rate, this does not apply to it when grown in industrial schools. 

 An acre of land planted with mulberries, for which the month's 

 occupation is supplied gratuitously, is worth permanently at least 

 £50 per annum. Apply this on a large scale, and, combined with 

 other similar resources, you not only create for these institutions 

 constant lucrative endowments, relieving the Government of great 

 expense, but train up a large number of the waste population to a 

 certain knowledge of special employments, which they will ultimately 

 diffuse up and down the length and breadth of Australia. 



THE GAME BIKDS OF INDIA. 



Read by H. E. Watts, Esq., at a Meeting held June 22, 1864. 



Of all countries there is none which, in my opinion, offers a more 

 promising field for the labours of our Acclimatisation Society than 

 our great Eastern dependency of India. This is pre-eminently the 

 great market for animals in the Eastern world, from which we have 

 to derive what supplies we require, to stock the comparatively 

 scanty and barren lands of Australia. The facilities which already 

 exist for the interchange of productions are greater than those 

 between this continent and any other part of the world. The 

 distance which separates us is comparatively a short one — the com- 

 munication is frequent, easy, and regular. The steamers of the 



