nd a
dependency of New South Wales, was first colonised in 1835. It received
in 1851 its present name. Queensland, formerly known as the Moreton Bay
District, was established as late as 1859. A settlement of North
Australia was tried in 1838, and has since been abandoned. On the other
side of Bass's Straits, the island of Van Diemen's Land, was named
Tasmania, and established as a penal colony in 1803.

Advance, Australia! The scattered handfuls of people have become a
nation, one with us in race, and character, and worthiness of aim. These
little volumes will, in course of time, include many aids to a knowledge
of the shaping of the nations. There will be later records of Australia
than these which tell of the old Dutch explorers, and of the first real
awakening of England to a knowledge of Australia by Dampier's voyage.

The great Australian continent is 2,500 miles long from east to west, and
1,960 miles in its greatest breadth. Its climates are therefore various.
The northern half lies chiefly within the tropics, and at Melbourne snow
is seldom seen except upon the hills. The separation of Australia by
wide seas from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, gives it animals and
plants peculiarly its own. It has been said that of 5,710 plants
discovered, 5,440 are peculiar to that continent. The kangaroo also is
proper to Australia, and there are other animals of like kind. Of 58
species of quadruped found in Australia, 46 were peculiar to it. Sheep
and cattle that abound there now were introduced from Europe. From eight
merino sheep introduced in 1793 by a settler named McArthur, there has
been multiplication into millions, and the food-store of the Old World
begins to be replenished by Australian mutton.

The unexplored interior has given a happy hunting-ground to satisfy the
British spirit of adventure and research; but large waterless tracts,
that baffle man's ingenuity, have put man's powers of endurance to sore
trial.

The mountains of Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there
are either no fossil traces of past life, or the traces are of life in
the most ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the
Ural range, which he had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick
Murchison, in 1844, to predict that gold would be found in Australia. The
first finding of gold--the beginning of the history of the Australian
gold-fields--was in February, 1851, near Bathurst and Well