Page:The life of Matthew Flinders.djvu/192

Rh the correct judgment he had formed, from various indications, of the existence of a wide opening between Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales."

Throughout this voyage we find Bass expending his abundant energies in the making of inland excursions whenever an opportunity occurred. To take a boat up rivers, to cut through rough country, to climb, examine soil, make notes on birds and beasts, and exercise his enquiring mind in all directions, was his constant delight.

The profusion of wild life upon the coasts and islands explored during the voyage astonished the travellers. Seals were seen in thousands, sea-birds in hundreds of millions. Flinders' calculation regarding the sooty petrels has already been quoted. Black swans were observed in great quantities. Bass, for example, stated that he saw three hundred of these stately birds within a space a quarter of a mile square. The Roman poet Juvenal could think of no better example of a thing of rare occurrence than a black swan:

"Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

But here black swans could have been cited in a simile illustrating profusion. Bass quaintly stated that the "dying song" of the swan, so celebrated by poets, "exactly resembled the creaking of a rusty ale-house sign on a windy day." The remark is not so pretty as, but far more true than, that of the bard who would have us believe that the dying swan:  "In music's strains breathes out her life and verse,   And, chaunting her own dirge, rides on her watery hearse."

The couplet of Coleridge is vitiated by the same error, but may merit commendation for practical wisdom:  "Swans sing before they die; 'twere no bad thing    Should certain persons die before they sing."