252 
TmE TROPICAL AGJfiCULTUEIST. 
[Oct. 1, 190Q. 
all directions--noi'th, west, and south— from the 
various coastal cities. The settler, having select- 
ed his laud, can camp on it with his family 
in a tent in perfect safety. There are 
no wild beasts for him to fear. If his fire goes on'c 
at night, no prowling lion or hungry leopard springs 
upon him in the dark ; no band of savages takes 
advantage of his defenceless condition to murder and 
plunder him. He can safely set to work, build his house 
of the bush timber, fence his laud with the material at 
his hand, and set to work with the almost certainty of 
taking off his first crop within six monthb. No ele- 
phants or monkeys are here to trample down and carry 
off his corn or sngar-cane, or dig up his sweet potatoes 
for him. Here, he has perfect peace, a life of labour, 
but also a life full of comfort and enjoyment. He has 
no hordes of natives to do his work for him, and so 
does not yield himself up to a life of voluptuous idle- 
ness, a result which invariably happens in countries 
with a vast native population, as in parts of Asia, 
Africa, the Indies, and South Sea Islands. Here the 
farmer is able to work with his family and his farm 
hands, and it is only in the sugar districts that a 
certain amount of reliable black labour is necessary, 
although such labour is anything but what is called 
cheap labour. 
Then take the question of roads and markets. 
The Queensland farmers are in almost every district 
in touch with a railway line. There 'are many 
large coastal cities, many large inland cities and 
towns in Queensland alone, where a good market 
exists for all the produce they can supply. In 
addition to these, they have the sout'iern markets 
which can take large quantities of produce. How 
does the case stand in South Africa ? There are 
few railways, few roads and few markets. The dis- 
tances between these market towns are enormous, 
unless in the older settlements in Cape Colony ; 
and old settlers in Queensland will rsmember how, 
in the old days, the only mevxns of; carrying wool and 
other produce to the ievt towns on the coast were the 
lumberirgbuUock-dray or horse- wagon. Weeks and even 
monihs were spent in such travelling. Now, a glance 
at the map of th-? two S-uth African colonies will 
show what long distixnces would have to be travelled 
by farmers settling, say, in thewestern portion of the 
Transvaal or in the central and north-eastern districts 
of the Orange River Colony. Still greater difficulties 
of transit must be encountered by settlers in Bechnana- 
land or in Rhodesia, where there are scarcely any market 
towns except Buluwayo and Salisbury in the latter, and 
Mafeking and Taungs in the former. Such being the 
outlook for transport and markets, how can the 
Australian farmer hope to better himself by pioneering 
in such a country evenjwith land at from Is to4s per acre? 
With minerals the same objections arise : want of 
water and want of railways. Why go to South Africa 
to prospect, when such magnificent fields as the 
Etheridge and many other auriferous districts of 
Queensland in the midst of white settlement, with 
good roads, timber, and good land together with a fair 
rainfall, lie open to the prospector, and are capable of 
supporting large mining population", and affording 
many openings for remunerative subsidiary industries? 
No, we should recommend our Queensland 
farmers and miners, mechanics and labourers, to re- 
member that it is "distance that lends enchantment 
to the view," and to also remember that not one of 
our colonies offers such excellent prospects to agri- 
cultural and mining settlers as does this splendid 
colony of Queensland with its excellent climate its 
iast laws, its British institutions, its freedom, for all, 
its illimitable agricultural lands, its forests, rivers and 
mines, its roads, railways, telegraphs, and its numerous 
cities and towns. Most of these advantagps are yet 
in the womb of the future in the two South African 
colonics, and an immense amount of pioneering work 
willhavo to be doneby the Australian who elects to 
abandon his comfortable home for the unsettled por- 
tions of tho new colonies.— Queendatid Agricultural 
Journal. Aug 1. 
A GIANT ELEPHANT'S TUSK. 
A gigantic elephant'.* tusk comes from the 
interior of German East Africa, A native 
was the fortunate hunter who bagged this 
trophy, and it is .s.aid that the fellow 
tusk was onh;' a trifle .smaller. The big tusk 
weighs 241 pounds. Tiie two tnsks were brought 
by way of Baganioyo to Zanzibar, where an 
American acquired tlietn at a fancy price. Some 
idea can be lormed of the gigantic size of the 
elephant, when we relleet that it carried about 
with it an appendage of well-nigh five cwt in tusks ! 
Sad to relate, elephants of this size are be- 
coming rarer every day. The merciless war of 
extermination carried on for years against the 
elepliant by ivory hunters lias been only too 
successful. Wiiere once immense lierds vere to 
be seen, you may now travel for hundreds (A iniies 
in the vain search for those forest monsters. They 
tend to retire further and fnither from the coast 
in quest of solitudes as yet uninvaded by man. 
Perhaps the recent regulations made at the 
Foreign Office Conference in London may help to 
improve matters. — Home imp er, Aug. 24. 
— - - - . - 
ARRIVAL IN CEYLON OF A KEW BOTANIST: 
FOR EXPERIMENTAL GARDENS, MALAYA. 
Amongst the passengers who arrived here 
recently by the steamer "Hakata Maru/' was 
Mr. Stanley Arden, a recent Kew student, 
who has been appointed Superintendent of 
Government Experimental Plantations m the 
Malay Federated States. Mr. Arden, in ac- 
cordance with official instructions, broke 
his journey here for the purpose of visiting the 
Botanic Gardens and obtaining a general 
knowledge of Ceylon products and the con- 
ditions under which they are cultivated. 
At Peradeniya he was met by Mr Mac- 
millau, a brother Kewite, and while there, 
he made arrangements for visiting certain 
estates and government rubber plantations. 
Mr. Arden, being educated at Stockport 
Technical College, has had the usual train- 
ing find a successful career at Kew. In 1896 
he was the winner of the Hertfordshire 
County Council's Scholarship. JMr. Arden 
left Kew in ,\pril last and has been C[ualifying 
himself in special directions for his new work. 
As experiments in rubber cultivation are 
intended to take up his chief attention at 
first, he went to Cambridge to study, under 
Professor Marshall Ward, with his assistants, 
Messrs. Biffen and Parkin, the most approved 
scientific methods of treating rubber latices 
for coagulation, and to acquaint himself with 
the principles of Biffen's patent coagulating 
machine. 
Mr. Arden is much struck with what he 
has seen of the vegetation of the tropics, 
more especially with the wealth and beauty 
of the Peradeniya Gardens, the extensive 
undulating green lawns of which he con- 
siders are particularly grand. Most of the 
trees and shrubs, however, are familiar to him 
through his acquaintance with them at Kew, 
but here many of them appear in an in- 
credibly altered form. We wish Mr. Arden 
a successful career in his new sphere of work, 
and will watch with interest the results of 
his experiments, and hope to include the same 
from time to time in our Tropical AfjH- 
culturifit. 
