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 highlands. In summer the sun has great power, and the temperature reaches 100° in the shade, with hot winds blowing from the interior. The weather on the whole is remarkably dry. At Adelaide there are on an average 120 rainy days per annum, with a mean rainfall of 20.88 in. The country is naturally very healthful, as evidence of which may be mentioned that no great epidemic has ever visited the state.

Western Australia has practically only two seasons, the winter or wet season, which commences in April and ends in October, and the summer or dry season, which comprises the remainder of the Year. During the wet season frequent and heavy rains fall, and thunderstorms, with sharp showers, occur in the summer, especially on the north-west coast, which is sometimes visited by hurricanes of great violence. In the southern and early-settled parts of the state the mean temperature is about 64°, but in the more northern portions the heat is excessive, though the dryness of the atmosphere makes it preferable to moist tropical climates. The average rainfall at Perth is 33 in. per annum.

The climate of the Northern Territory is extremely hot, except on the elevated tablelands; altogether, the temperature of this part of the continent is very similar to that of northern Queensland, and the climate is not favourable to Europeans. The rainfall in the extreme north, especially in January and February, is very heavy, and the annual average along the coast is about 63 in. The whole of the peninsula north of 15° S. has a rainfall considerably exceeding 40 in. This region is backed by a belt of about 100 m. wide, in which the rainfall is from 30 to 40 in., from which inwards the rainfall gradually declines until between Central Mount Stuart and Macdonnell ranges it falls to between 5 and 10 in.

Fauna and Flora.—The origin of the fauna and flora of Australia has attracted considerable attention. Much accumulated evidence, biological and geological, has pointed to a southern extension of India, an eastern extension of South Africa, and a western extension of Australia into the Indian Ocean. The comparative richness of proteaceous plants in Western Australia and South Africa first suggested a common source for these primitive types. Dr H. O. Forbes drew attention to a certain community amongst birds and other vertebrates, invertebrates, and amongst plants, on all the lands stretching towards the south pole. A theory was therefore propounded that these known types were all derived from a continent which has been named Antarctica. The supposed continent extended across the south pole, practically joining Australia and South America. Just as we have evidence of a former mild climate in the arctic regions, so a similar mild climate has been postulated for Antarctica. Modern naturalists consider that many of the problems of Australia’s remarkable fauna and flora can be best explained by the following hypothesis:—The region now covered by the antarctic ice-cap was in early Tertiary times favoured by a mild climate; here lay an antarctic continent or archipelago. From an area corresponding to what is now South America there entered a fauna and flora, which, after undergoing modification, passed by way of Tasmania to Australia. These immigrants then developed, with some exceptions, into the present Australian flora and fauna. This theory has advanced from the position of a disparaged heresy to acceptance by leading thinkers. The discovery as fossil, in South America, of primitive or ancestral forms of marsupials has given it much support. One of these, Prothylacinus, is regarded as the forerunner of the marsupial wolf of Tasmania. An interesting link between divergent marsupial families, still living in Ecuador, the Coenolestes, is another discovery of recent years. On the Australian side the fact that Tasmania is richest in marsupial types indicates the gate by which they entered. It is not to be supposed that this antarctic element, to which Professor Tate has applied the name Euronotian, entered a desert barren of all life. Previous to its arrival Australia doubtless possessed considerable vegetation and a scanty fauna, chiefly invertebrate. At a comparatively recent date Australia received its third and newest constituent. The islands of Torres Strait have been shown to be the denuded remnant of a former extension of Cape York peninsula in North Queensland. Previous to the existence of the strait, and across its site, there poured into Australia a wealth of Papuan forms. Along the Pacific slope of the Queensland Cordillera these found in soil and climate a congenial home. Among the plants the wild banana, pepper, orange and mangosteen, rhododendron, epiphytic orchids and the palm; among mammals the bats and rats; among birds the cassowary and rifle birds; and among reptiles the crocodile and tree snakes, characterize this element. The numerous facts, geological, geographical and biological, which when linked together lend great support to this theory, have been well worked out in Australia by Mr Charles Hedley of the Australian Museum, Sydney.

The zoology of Australia and Tasmania presents a very conspicuous point of difference from that of other regions of the globe, in the prevalence of non-placental mammalia. The vast majority of the mammalia are provided with an organ in the uterus, by which, before the birth of their young, a vascular connexion is maintained between the embryo and the parent animal. There are two orders, the Marsupialia and the Monotremata, which do not possess this organ; both these are found in Australia, to which region indeed they are not absolutely confined.

The geographical limits of the marsupials are very interesting. The opossums of America are marsupials, though not showing anomalies as great as kangaroos and bandicoots (in their feet), and Myrmecobius (in the number of teeth). Except the opossums, no single living marsupial is known outside the Australian zoological region. The forms of life characteristic of India and the Malay peninsula come down to the island of Bali. Bali is separated from Lombok by a strait not more than 15 m. wide. Yet this narrow belt of water is the boundary line between the Australasian and the Indian regions. The zoological boundary passing through the Bali Strait is called “Wallace’s line,” after the eminent naturalist who was its discoverer. He showed that not only as regards beasts, but also as regards birds, these regions are thus sharply limited. Australia, he pointed out, has no woodpeckers and no pheasants, which are widely-spread Indian birds. Instead of these it has mound-making turkeys, honey-suckers, cockatoos and brush-tongued lories, all of which are found nowhere else in the world.

The marsupials constitute two-thirds of all the Australian species of mammals. It is the well-known peculiarity of this order that the female has a pouch or fold of skin upon her abdomen, in which she can place the young for suckling within reach of her teats. The opossum of America is the only species out of Australasia which is thus provided. Australia is inhabited by at least 110 different species of marsupials, which is about two-thirds of the known species; these have been arranged in five tribes, according to the food they eat, viz., the grass-eaters (kangaroos), the root-eaters (wombats), the insect-eaters (bandicoots), the flesh-eaters (native cats and rats), and the fruit-eaters (phalangers).

The kangaroo (Macropus) lives in droves in the open grassy plains. Several smaller forms of the same general appearance are known as wallabies, and are common everywhere. The kangaroo and most of its congeners show an extraordinary disproportion of the hind limbs to the fore part of the body. The rock wallabies again have short tarsi of the hind legs, with a long pliable tail for climbing, like that of the tree kangaroo of New Guinea, or that of the jerboa. Of the larger kangaroos, which attain a weight of 200 ℔ and more, eight species are named, only one of which is found in Western Australia. Fossil bones of extinct kangaroo species are met with; these kangaroos must have been of enormous size, twice or thrice that of any species now living.

There are some twenty smaller species in Australia and Tasmania, besides the rock wallabies and the hare kangaroos; these last are wonderfully swift, making clear jumps 8 or 10 ft. high. Other terrestrial marsupials are the wombat (Phascolomys), a large, clumsy, burrowing animal, not unlike a pig, which attains a weight of from 60 to 100 ℔; the bandicoot (Perameles), a rat-like creature whose depredations annoy the agriculturist; the native cat (Dasyurus), noted robber of the poultry yard; the Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus), which preys on large game; and the recently discovered Notoryctes, a small animal which burrows like a mole in the desert of the interior. Arboreal species include the well-known opossums (Phalanger); the extraordinary tree-kangaroo of the Queensland tropics; the flying squirrel, which expands a membrane between the legs and arms, and by its aid makes long sailing jumps from tree to tree; and the native bear (Phascolarctos), an animal with no affinities to the bear, and having a long soft fur and no tail.

The Myrmecobius of Western Australia is a bushy-tailed ant-eater about the size of a squirrel, and from its lineage and structure of more than passing interest. It is, Mivart remarks, a survival of a very ancient state of things. It had ancestors in a flourishing condition during the Secondary epoch. Its congeners even then lived in England, as is proved by the fact that their relics have been found in the Stonesfield oolitic rocks, the deposition of which is separated from that which gave rise to the Paris Tertiary strata by an abyss of past time which we cannot venture to express even in thousands of years.

We pass on to the other curious order of non-placental mammals, that of the Monotremata, so called from the structure of their organs of evacuation with a single orifice, as in birds. Their abdominal bones are like those of the marsupials; and they are furnished with pouches for their young, but have no teats, the milk being distilled into their pouches from the mammary glands. Australia and Tasmania possess two animals of this order—the echidna, or spiny