ol 
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 1—and without the 
means of brewing it, unless by the employment of obnoxious and 
unpalatable drugs 1 The beverage which has immortalized the names 
of Bass and Allsop, which has been the means of strewing the 
summit of the Bhigi and the slopes of the Pyramids with the vitreous 
evidences of Jolm 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 wliicli 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 county of Kent, for example, and obliterate from 
its surface those lovely hop gardens, with their “ long-drawn aisles” 
overrun with a livuig 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, Cobliam, and Penshurst; those chequered 
masses of colour which beautify every cottager’s patch of homely 
flowers ; and the faco 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 
showing 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; ior 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, 
d 2 
