its steppes, America its prairies, Egypt its deserts, and
Australia its "scrub." The plains, so called, are covered by a
low-growing bush, compact and almost impenetrable in places, composed of
a dwarf eucalyptus. The appearance of a large reach of this "scrub" is
desolate indeed, the underlying soil being a sort of yellow sand which
one would surely think could produce nothing else; yet, wherever this
land has been cleared and properly irrigated it has proved to be
remarkably fertile.

[Illustration: BOTANICAL GARDENS AT ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA.]

All of these colonial cities have botanical gardens, in the cultivation
and arrangement of which much skill and scientific knowledge is
displayed. In that of Adelaide we see the Australian bottle-tree, which
is a native of this country only. It receives its name from its
resemblance in shape to a junk-bottle. This tree has the property of
storing water in its hollow trunk,--a well-known fact, which has often
proved a providential supply for thirsty travellers in a country so
liable to severe drought. Here, also, we see the correa, with its stiff
stem and prickly leaves, bearing a curious string of delicate, pendulous
flowers, red, orange, and white, not unlike the fuchsia in form. The
South Sea myrtle is especially attractive, appearing when in flower with
round clustering bunches of bloom, spangled with white stars. The
styphelia, a heath-like plant, surprises us with its green flowers. We
are shown a specimen of the sandrach-tree, brought from Africa, which is
almost imperishable, and from which the Mohammedans invariably make the
ceilings of their mosques. The Indian cotton-tree looms up beside the
South American aloe--this last, with its thick, bayonet-like leaves, is
ornamented in wavy lines like the surface of a Toledo blade. The
grouping of these exotics, natives of regions so far apart on the
earth's surface, yet quite domesticated here, forms an incongruous
though pleasing picture.

West Australia, of which Perth is the capital, is eight hundred miles in
width and thirteen hundred long from north to south, actually covering
about one-third of the continent. It embraces all that portion lying to
the westward of the one hundred and twenty-ninth meridian of east
longitude, and has an area of about a million square miles. It has few
towns and is very sparsely settled, Perth having scarcely eleven
thousand inhabitants, and the whole province a population of not over
forty