Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/262

 miles; but these elevations being all of an undulating, not a precipitous character, no part of the country can be considered strictly alpine.

The features on the exterior and interior of this range of hills differ so much as to present the results of climates usually found much further apart, especially on the eastern coast, where between the mountains and the sea—as, for instance, at Illawarra, Port Macquarie, and Moreton Bay—the vegetation partakes to a great extent of a tropical character; and on the rich debris washed down from the hills we find forests of towering palms and various species of gum-trees (Eucalypti), the surface of the ground beneath clothed with dense and impervious underwood, composed of dwarf trees, shrubs, and tree-ferns, festooned with creepers and parasitic plants, from the size of a convolvulus and vine to the cable of a man-of-war. These dense forests, through which exploring travellers have been obliged to cut their way inland at the rate of not more than a mile or two a day, are interspersed with open glades or meadow reaches, admirably adapted for pasturing cattle, to which the colonists have given the name of apple-tree flats, from the fancied resemblance between the apple-trees of Europe and those (Angophoræ) with which these glades are thinly dotted.

Within the ranges, on the other hand, are found immense open downs and grassy plains, divided by rocky and round-backed ranges of hills, and interspersed by open forest without undergrowth and detached belts of gum trees (Eucalypti acaciæ), presenting a park-like appearance, which, advancing towards the interior, are succeeded either by marshes, or sandy and stony deserts, perfectly sterile and uninhabitable, except by a few reptiles, and birds which prey upon them.

The rivers of Australia are few in number, and insignificant in a navigable point of view. The one series, rising from the seaside of the mountain range, flow deviously until they reach the coast, seldom affording a navigable stream more than twenty miles inland, usually rushing down with such rapidity during the rainy season as to fill up their sea-mouths with a bar which excludes all except boats of slight draught of water. The other series, falling toward the interior, are lost in quicksands, marshes, or shallow lakes, after a course varying from a score to many hundred miles of zigzag current, now flowing with a full, deep stream, and then suddenly diminishing to a depth of a few inches, or even totally and suddenly disappearing.

The Dutch colonists in South Africa have terms by which they express the exact value of flowing water, whether perpetual or intermittent, whether a mere rivulet or a deep stream; but there are no words invented in the English language which convey a correct idea of