INTRODUCTION, 
The natural history of new countries must always be deeply interesting-, and it is easy to fancy the 
delight experienced by Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander at the rich profusion of floral treasures, 
offered for their investigation, when, just a hundred years ago, they landed in a garden of new forms 
and called it Botany Bay. 
All there was strange. Strange the evergreen eucalypti, fringing the very waters edge—strange 
the grass-tree, like some tall native standing with poised spear—charmingly strange all the varied and 
beautiful flora of that luxuriant and yet mere sandy swamp lying along the coast to the south of Sydney 
_strange the bounding kangaroo and the stately emu of the more open glades—strange and beautiful 
the red, blue, and yellow, the rainbow-colored parrakeets that incessantly called and chattered welcome 
above the heads of the new-comers—strange that “ rara avis in terris ” the black swan, and all the 
other pretty water-fowl which dotted and adorned the bays of England’s new-won southern empire— 
strange, but neither charming nor beautiful, the veritable devil was soon found and described by one 
of Captain Cook’s terrified seamen to be “ as large as a one-gallon keg, with horns and wings, yet he 
crept so slowly I might have touched him if I had not been afeared,” which impersonation of the evil- 
one turned out to be the grey-headed vampire. 
From the day that Sir Joseph Banks called the new-found country Botany Bay—from the variety 
and profusion of its vegetable productions—the flora and fauna of Australia have been examined and 
studied with ever-increasing interest, and chiefs in the various departments of natural science have 
mapped out and described her families, genera, and species. In very truth, the natural productions of 
this great island-continent—differing in many respeHs as the fauna of Australia does from that of any 
other region_are worthy of investigation, especially by those who call this sunny land their home, 
and are proud to be the founders of another Britain in southern seas. 
Here, in her great wastes and deserts, the Carnivora one might expe6l to find in such wild 
solitudes, are represented only by the dingo or native dog; while on the other hand her plain s, her 
woods, her rocky gullies, her mountain heights abound with the various families of the Marsupiata. 
Here may be found marsupials, from the great kangaroo, an old man of which will be some six feet 
* high and of proportionate strength and sinew, down to the diminutive little kangaroo-rat of the size of 
a rabbit, and to that most exquisite Tom Thumb of a marsupial, the kangaroo-mouse, but three inches 
long. The various eucalypti abound with opossums, while the fat lazy koalas, and the no less lazy 
wombats, feed on the undergrowth. 
A land of vastness, with wide-spreading plains, and towering trees, and long rivers—a land of 
contradictions, where these same long rivers are sometimes of great breadth and depth, and run 
rapidly, and are at other times mere chains of ponds ; where some of them, after running some 
hundreds of miles, and exhibiting in places fine reaches of great depth, fringed with trees, and 
abounding with fish and fowl, will lose themselves entirely in a desert plain,—long rivers which, 
in all their course, have hardly a water-fall worthy of the name. 
A land, having a wide traCt of country, which one explorer designates as the most awful and 
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