A MAP SHOWING THE RAINFALL IN AUSTRALIA 



More than two-thirds of the territory of Australia has less than twenty inches of rainfall 

 a year. Washington, D. C, has 43 inches ; Boston, 43 ; Chicago, 33 ; Kansas City, 27 ', Atlanta, 

 49; New Orleans, 57; Denver, 14; San Francisco, 22, and Seattle, 36. Being without high 

 mountains, the continent has no summer snows to melt, which renders irrigation, except by 

 artesian wells, almost impossible. Fortunately the configuration of bedrock makes artesian 

 irrigation possible in many places, though the water so obtained is usually brackish. 



forests is their total unlikeness to any- 

 thing seen elsewhere. The great forests 

 of timber trees are not damp and shaded 

 and all of one species, but are well lighted 

 and filled with other forests of shorter 

 trees ; in places the woods consist of large 

 widely-spaced trees surrounded only by 

 bunch grass, and even in areas where 

 water is not to be found on the surface 

 for hundreds of square miles true forests 

 of low trees are present. 



Forms which may be recognized as 

 tulip, lily, honeysuckle, and fern take on 

 a surprising aspect. They are not garden 

 flowers, but trees, and the landscape of 

 which they form a part reminds one of 

 the hypothetical representations in books 

 of science of a landscape of Mesozoic 



time, a period antedating our own by 

 millions of years. 



The trees are indeed those of a bygone 

 age. In America and Europe shadowy 

 forms of fossil leaves of strange plant 

 species are gathered from the rock and 

 studied with interest ; in Australia many 

 of these ancient trees are living. The 

 impression that one is looking at a land- 

 scape which has forever disappeared 

 from other parts of the world is so vivid 

 that the elms and maples and oaks in 

 some of the city streets strike a jarring 

 note. The transition from Jurassic to 

 modern times is painfully abrupt. 



With a flora of such great interest, it 

 occasions no surprise to find that Austra- 

 lia is the home of many eminent botanists, 



4S8 



