842 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
[April i, 1882. 
There certainly can be no reason for leaving the 
pn-cious stones hidden in the bowels of the earth, 
where they have been for countless ages, but the 
present state of all matters connected therewith cannot 
be considered creditable to acommuuity under Euro- 
pean conirol. 
It is not iu this way that the Europeans at the head 
of affairs in Borneo manage the gold washing, at 
Sunbos, Pontianak and Banjirmassing ; and unless the 
Bambarabotuwa gem-diggers are looked after, we may 
look out for something startling one of thsee fine 
mornings. 
[In a private note to a friend, the writer adds: — "We 
had to clear our way along our old bridle-path from 
Boltumbe and in doing this came on several snakes. 
I send you one whole, which the natives, as usual, say 
is deadly 1 ; lit certainlyjlooks a dangerous beast to me, 
and the head of a big reptile that couM not be got into 
tbe bottle 2 . The snake the head belonged to was 
basking in the sunshine on a rock in the middle of 
the path. I have made drawings of the gem-diggers, 
huts, and of the hills where hundreds of gem-diggers 
are now in active operation. Could you put me in the 
way of sending them to one of the illustrated papers ? 
I think they are the kind of things that such papers 
would reproduce. I send with this a short account of 
what I saw and heard duriDg my trip. We did not 
find any people at work on our land, but we put up 
in a very good hut they had built, and saw plenty 
more huts and no end of gem-pits." We shall be glad 
to forward the sketches and the above description to 
the editor of the Graphic, who, we doubt not, will 
be very ready to make use of them. — Ed. 
SHEEP-FARMING IN QUEENSLAND. 
A correspondent sends us a description of a visit 
to a sheep-farm in Queensland by a friend who is 
making a tour of the world. We extract the follow- 
ing:— 
Queensland, in the island continent of Australia, though 
only last year it attained its majority as a distinct and 
separate colonies, is not the least among the Australian 
colonies, ranking rather as the third in size, with an area 
equal to twenty-three per cent of the whole area of 
that island, antipodeal to Britain, and which, though 
tight, cau hardly be learned little. * * * 
Plenty of elbow-room there is within its boundaries, 
for, on an area of 669,520 square miles, there are only 
in this, the census year of 1881, 218,000 persons; or, on 
the average, each person, whether man, woman, or child, 
may look over a space of 2,0C0 acres, as, in a sense, being 
personal property. 
That the personal interest, in districts known to, or 
occupied by, the squatter, is a large one, the principal 
export, wool, by which the colony is perhaps more part- 
icularly known, declares. Other growths, other products, 
are now rapidly making their way in its export lists, hut 
" revenans a noa moutons" ! 
1 This is one of the pit vipers, the kunakatuwa 
and polon-telissa of the Sinhalese, the Hypnale nepa, 
an oily-looking, flat-headed, marbled snake, very com- 
mon from the coast up to 6,000 feet elevation. It 
has been erroneously figured in Davy's Histoiy of 
Ceylon as the " karawala," which is the Bungarus 
Cei/lomnsis. 
2 The head indicates its close affinity to As- 
pidura Copii, so rare in 1864, when Giinther's work 
on the Reptiles of British India was published, that 
only one specimen was known, and this was 
conjectured to be from Ceylon. It has since been 
found in Dikoya, and one specimen exists in the 
Colombo Museum. The head sent proves that it is 
an aberrant form or new species of Aspidura. Could 
our friend try and secure an entire specimen of this 
snake ?— W. F. 
In the Qiieenrfander, a weekly newspaper published in 
Brisbane, which, I believe, goes generally through the 
town or country parts of the colony, several firms of 
stock and station agents have, weekly, announcements of 
stock and stations for sale which may may afford an idea 
of the belongings of squatters, which name still is used 
in reference to the representatives of the pastoral interest. 
One firm may advertize fifty stations, in one issue of 
the paper, for sale, varying in size from 50 to 2,000 
square miles, and perhaps, as in one case was counted, 
averaging 550 square miles. 
A few are reported as unstocked — several are stocked 
with cattle and sheep — a number with sheep counted by 
tens and scores of thousands, and the majority with 
cattle, also numbering thousands in teens and even scores. 
One station, offered for sale in the month of November, 
was stated to consist of about 190 square miles and to 
be held at an annual rental of a sum equivalent to Is 4d 
per acre ! 
Of the fifteen districts into which Queensland, polit- 
ically, is divided, that of the Darling Downs, discovered 
by Allan Cunningham, the botanical explorer, and called 
by him after Governor Darling, is perhaps well-known in 
the temple of pastoral fame. To its devotees, at least, it 
bears a charmed name, 
Roughly, from its extremities, which have almost the 
form of a square, it extends over 3° of latitude and longit- 
ude, and more exactly covers an area of 25,300 square 
miles. Four and one half of such districts would equal 
the United Kingdom in area nearly. Accordingly to 
the Queensland Gazetteer which is, and should be, an 
authoritative publication, Darling Downs " is the richest 
pastoral district in the colony, and also comprises a vast 
extent of fine agricultural land." Sheep grow to a good 
size, and their wool is of good quality. Away west, 
on the plains watered by the rivers Barcoo, Thomson and 
Upper Flinders, sheep thrive well, but they are not so 
easily reached by a tourist as those of the Darling Downs 
which lie immediately to the west of Moreton district, in 
which Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, is situated. A 
Government railway, starting from Brisbane, now runs 
west through the northern part of the Darling Downs 
district with a present terminus at Roma, in Maranoa, 
the district to the west of Darling Downs. The railway 
has, by degrees, been constructed within the last decade 
of years. Having the opportunity to visit a station, 
where the squatter's harvest, or shearing was in full 
swing, not far away from the line of railway, as it passes 
through Darling Downs, first thought and second thought 
we equally ready to jump at the offer, as a chance of 
seeing a representative Queensland station while the bustle 
of its busiest season could be mixed with. 
"But surely," thought the tourist, after alighting from 
the railway train, mounting a buggy by the side of the 
manager of the station, being driven a distance of a 
couple of miles or so, and being told that a large shed 
fifty yards off to the right was the wool shed where 
shearing was going on — "there must be some mistake. 
There is no appearance of bustle there. TThere are the 
sheep, shorn or unshorn. There is not even a ' baa' to be 
heard. They don't do this thing so in the old country. 
Is it a ' new chum' he 's thinking of playing upon ?" 
But a " new chum"'s five months experience in Australia 
directs him to wait for the denouement patiently after 
returning from the house where at first he was set down. 
The house is a comfortable one-storied building, with, at 
the time, a beautiful scarlet-coloured, fuchsia-like flower- 
ing creeper meandering over the sides and along the I 
verandah, which opens out on a pleasantly tree-shaded M 
garden kept in good order by an industrious pigtailed I 
oriental. A creek, with permanent water with ample | 
swimming space for open-air bathers, is close at hand. 
For domestic and bathing purposes in the house, aud for j 
watering the plants in the garden, water, by horse-power, 
is pumped from the creek to reservoir tanks from which 
it can, by gravitation, flow down to its destination. 
There is a slight inaccuracy in the foregoing sentence, 
becanse the bath-house is a little building in the garden 
a few steps off from the main building-. If one can't 
be accurate, one eh uld be as accurate as one can. 
The kitchen &c, with servants' quarters, is also a little 
way off, but connected with it by a covered and creeper- 
