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A COLONIAL NAVAL RESERVE. The only solution of the difficulty is on the lines I have suggested elsewhere, for dealing with the dearth of British seamen in the British Mercantile Marine. Some of the fine sailing-ships trading to the ports of Melbourne and Sydney should be subsidised by the Colonial Government to carry a certain number of Colonial boys. After three years in these vessels these lads would have a fair acquaintance with seamanship. They should then serve a year in a sea-going man-of-war, at the conclusion of which they would be eligible for the first-class Naval Reserve, and would enter the Colonial Mercantile Marine as A.B.'s. The present retaining fee of a first-class Naval Reserve man is 6l. per annum. To attract and hold Colonial seamen in sufficient numbers in the Royal Naval Reserve the retaining fee would probably have to be raised to 10l. The Colonial Governments might fairly be asked to provide a proportion of the increased fee. The Australian Naval Reserve man, in case of need, would be utilised, in the first place, to make up the complements of the ships of the auxiliary squadron, which are kept in reserve, but he would also be liable to serve, like the Naval Reserve man enrolled in England, in H.M.'s ships in every part of the world.

IRRIGATION COLONIES.

During the last ten years large sums of money have been spent in Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia, on artesian boring, on the whole with conspicuous success. The water so obtained is used for watering stock, but there is, I believe, only one place—a small settlement in the neighbourhood of Bourke—where artesian water is used 207