Page:Victoria, with a description of its principal cities, Melbourne and Geelong.djvu/85

 principally on half-roasted animal food and different roots, which they display a wonderful shrewdness in discovering. They are said to devour their enemies when taken in battle. As a people, they are fast disappearing; in fact, in the eastern part of Victoria but few are to be found. Their fate has been accelerated by the influence of disease, which they had no skill to baffle; almost invariably their contact with the white man has been attended with unmixed evil to them, more particularly from the inordinate love they soon acquire for ardent spirits, and thus, as the settler advances, they are fast dwindling away from the vast country once their own.

The sketch relative to the advancement of agriculture, and its extent in the colony, we defer to our closing chapter, as its progress is daily becoming more apparent. By waiting for the latest accounts, we will have the opportunity of giving the fullest and most favourable view of the subject.

Many places in Victoria are so densely timbered, that, to prepare a single acre for the plough would be as much as any two men could accomplish in a week. The timber is not of such value as one would suppose, in consequence of the difficulty and expense in sawing and carting it away, and the largest trees are uniformly uneven and rotten within. Nor have the settlers of Australia the same facilities the American has, for they cannot make rafts of it to send down the rivers; the timber of Australia will not float. There is, however, one advantage derived