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quince ; Spain the pomegranate, and the " oranges and lemons," so 

 popularly associated with " the bells of St. Clement's ;" and North 

 America the raspberry and the walnut. It was early in the same 

 century, too, that England borrowed from the Netherlands, and 

 planted in her southern counties, the most beautiful, and, withal, 

 the most useful, of all creepers — the hop plant. Imagine the condi- 

 tion of the people of England without bitter beer ! — and without the 

 means of brewing it, unless by the employment of obnoxious and 

 unpalatable drugs ! The beverage which has immortalized the names 

 of Bass and Allsop, which has been the means of strewing the 

 summit of the Rhigi and the slopes of the Pyramids with the vitreous 

 evidences of John Bull's ubiquity ; which has made the tropical heat 

 of an East Indian summer endurable ; which has imparted its own 

 briskness and sparkle to Australian picnics ; and which has given 

 Englishmen of the nineteenth century the new sensation which 

 Xerxes ineffectually sighed for — this beverage, I say, is one of the 

 fruits of acclimatisation, and must be taken credit for accordingly. 

 Fully to appreciate what this beneficent agency has accomplished for 

 the mother country, we have only to picture one of her counties 

 denuded of every natural feature which has been borrowed from 

 abroad. Take the comity of Kent, for example, and obliterate from 

 its surface those lovely hop gardens, with their " long-drawn aisles " 

 overrun with a living tracery of green and gold ; those leafy orchards, 

 glowing with their ruddy fruitage ; those rippling fields of yellowing 

 wheat ; those picturesque hedge rows of hazel ; those stately 

 gardens at Knowle, Cobham, and Penshurst ; those chequered 

 masses of colour which beautify every cottager's patch of homely 

 flowers ; and the face of the country would be not merely transformed, 

 but deformed. It would be as unlike the Kent of to-day as a noble 

 fresco would be unlike its former self, after having received a thin 

 coat of whitewash. I leave to other and to abler hands the task of 

 showinfif what acclimatisation has done for England in so far as the 

 animal kingdom is concerned ; for the subject is a wide one, and is 

 entitled to more skilful treatment than I am qualified to bestow upon 

 it. I have confined my attention to one particular only ; and I 

 have selected this theme because it appears to me that we ought to 

 derive encouragement here, from the knowledge of what our fore- 

 fathers accomplished elsewhere, under circumstances especially 

 unfavourable to the work ; for I need not remind you, that in the 

 sixteenth century the means of communication between the different 

 countries of the world were few in number, tedious in operation, and 

 liable to all sorts of obstructions. The timid scruples, sordid sus- 

 picions, and jealous fears of one nation, frequently prohibited or 

 impeded the exportation of such seeds or plants as were likely to 

 prove beneficial to another ; and all foreigners were looked upon as 

 hateful rivals or natural enemies, whom it was lawful to defraud in 

 time of peace, and to plunder and pauperize in time of war. If the 

 stupid and barbarous policy is not wholly exploded, it is, at any rate, 



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