144 Dr Lauder Lindsay on the Place and Power of 
Example of Victoria in its Encouragement of Natural History. 
In connection with the schemes I have above advocated, I would 
ask you to look to the example set you by your near neighbour 
and fair sister Victoria, Consider what Melbourne has accom- 
plished for the promotion of science during the short ten years of 
her existence. Visit her magnificent Botanic Gardens—her excel- 
lent Museums of Natural History, Geology, Mining, Agriculture, 
&c,—her University and her Royal Society—and see whether these 
do not afford proof of an enlightened recognition of the value of 
the Natural Sciences as a power in colonisation. What Melbourne 
has achieved, Otago may, with similar energy, aspire to accom- 
plish. ‘I am sanguine as to the future of your province. I 
believe that, independently altogether of the gold-fields, it pos- 
sesses many elements of future greatness and distinction ; that it 
has boundless resources, which it will take many years fully to 
develope and appreciate ; that, prior to the discoveries of Gabriel 
Read, Otago was progressing ‘“ slowly but surely,” silently and 
unostentatiously, but substantially, in all that constitutes a 
healthy colonisation. But I believe, further, that though this 
satisfactory progress would have continued had there been no gold 
discovery in your province, one result of such discovery will be 
to render the said progress greatly more rapid. You will find 
the colony in one year in a position it would probably not have 
reached in ten or perhaps twenty. Much depends—though every- 
thing does not depend—on the permanency of your Gold Mining, 
the extent and productiveness of your gold-fields. To take the 
worst view of the question,—should the gold-fields fail, should they 
prove of very limited extent, there would probably result an im- 
mediate great commercial distress—a distress, however, that would 
probably affect your speculative Victorian brethren more than 
yourselves. Your country would remain much in the state in 
which the discovery of the gold-fields found it, with the exception 
that your settlers would have the advantages of additional popu- 
lation, additional roads and bridges, and other desirable results of 
the temporary influx of population. There is no reason, however, 
for supposing the gold-fields of Otago to be of very local charac- 
ter, or of very limited extent; while experience is daily showing 
they are abundantly productive. To what extent they will com- 
pete in the long-run with the Victorian gold-fields remains to be 
seen. That they are at present competing successfully therewith 
is a fact that can no longer be doubted, I have repeatedly been 
assured by gold-seekers—many of them of Californian as well as 
Australian experience—that the escort returns of no single gold- 
field in other countries, within the same space of time, have ever 
equalled those of Tuapeka, and that Gabriel’s Gully has proved, 
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