9 
Introductory Paper . 
committed, and essentially consist in the misapplication 
of rules to cases which do not properly belong to them. 
Methods of cultivation and management which are 
practised with the utmost propriety and advantage in 
Great Britain, may be very improper and prejudicial in 
the different soil and climate of Australia; and the settler 
who has derived his early ideas and habits from the 
former country will be extremely apt to go wrong, by 
applying them, without discrimination, to the altered 
circumstances of the latter. 
Nor is it only by the employment of inappropriate and 
ill-adapted instruments and methods that the inhabitants 
of a new country are exposed to error, and consequent 
inconvenience and loss. They sometimes incur even 
greater risk from their total ignorance of what is proper 
to be done in their new situation. Their former observa¬ 
tion and experience may have been so completely foreign 
to their present position, as to afford them no means 
whatever to meet some of its greatest exigencies—to avert 
some formidable evil, or secure some important good. 
The climate of England is remarkable for its humidity; 
and those employed in its agriculture have had all their 
habits of thought and action formed in adaptation to this 
condition of its atmosphere. The climate of Australia, 
on the contrary, is equally remarkable for its dryness. 
One of the principal objects to be aimed at in the cultiva¬ 
tion of land there, is to supply it as liberally as possible 
with moisture. The two countries are, in this important 
respect, in a state of mutual contrast and opposition. 
Surface-draining is the great modern improvement in 
British agriculture. A system of artificial irrigation, 
skilfully applied, is the chief desideratum in Australia. 
The success which lias already attended the very few and 
imperfect attempts at irrigation here, sufficiently demon¬ 
strates the immense extent to which its general applica- 
