olled into a
ball, and placed in hot ashes to bake. The loaf is called "_a damper_."
The country, as far as I have seen it, bears evident marks of great
volcanic change. You meet with a stone, round like a turnip, as hard as
iron, like rusty iron in appearance, and on the outside honey-combed.
There are large beds of it for miles. You then come to the flat country
where the soil surpasses any thing you can conceive in richness, fit for
any cultivation under heaven, and upwards of fifteen feet in depth. Before
I quitted London, I heard that the climate of Australia was fine and
equable, seldom varying, and well suited to a delicate constitution. I am
satisfied that many consumptive persons _live_ here, who in Scotland would
be carried off in a month. You seldom hear a person cough. In church I
have listened in vain for a single _hoste_; no, not even before the
commencement of a psalm do you find the _haughting_ and _clachering_ that
are indispensable in England. All pipes are clear as bell. I noticed this
as a phenomenon on my first arrival. We are now, as you would say, in the
dead of winter; a strange announcement to a British ear in the month of
July. The air is chill in the morning and evening, before sunrise and
after sunset, but during the day the weather is as fine as on the finest
September day in Scotland. Notwithstanding what I have said, I would not
have you ground any theory upon my remarks as yet--or deceive Sir James
Clark, and the rest of the medical gentlemen, who are looking on all sides
of the world for a climate for their hopeless invalids. I have stated
facts, but those which follow are no less authentic. On the 30th and 31st
of December last, the thermometer at the observatory stood in the shade at
70 deg. and 72 deg. noon. On the 1st of January at noon, and up to three
o'clock, P.M., it stood in the shade at 92 deg. and 93 deg. On the 2d it
rose to 95 deg. at noon, and fell at sunset, eight P.M., to 69 deg. In the
middle of the foresaid month of December the thermometer was 86 deg. at
breakfast time, and before dinner down to 63 deg. These memoranda, gained
from undoubted sources, would show the climate--in summer at least--to be
more variable than my reference proves it; yet I am told that even in
summer time you hear of little sickness amongst grown up people. New
comers suffer from dysentery, and children are attacked in the same way. I
have had two visitations, from which I rallied in the course of