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56 Australia, to whose enlightened views and active patriotism the state has owed much.

We had tea at a hotel, whose verandah overlooked woods falling steeply away at the back. It was a charming little place, and we should have liked to stay there, forgetting that in Australia there is no soft, lingering twilight, but dusk follows immediately, darkness very swiftly, on the setting of the sun. Sometimes there is an afterglow, a luminous orange light suffuses the darkness, and the heavy masses of gum trees stand out inky black on the horizon. Such an afterglow illuminated our return journey from Mundaring Weir to Perth.

Apart from its natural beauty and engineering achievement, Mundaring Weir, or at least its neighbourhood, has a peculiar interest for the zoologist. It is the home of a certain little black animal. To the uninitiated its appearance is something between that of a small black slug and a caterpillar, but to the scientific man it is of paramount importance, because its legs are not real legs. Peripatus is its name, and it lives under stones. Only recently, however, the secluded and innocent life of the unfortunate peripatus has been rudely interrupted, and he was in fact well*nigh exterminated by the visit to Perth of a learned society all in search of specimens. So