o those points which curiosity, or a desire of personal
information, had prompted me to investigate. I did not, therefore, venture
to flatter myself that I had collected materials of sufficient importance
on general topics to enable me to write for the information of others.
Since my return to England, however, I have been strenuously urged to give
a short description of the colony before entering upon my personal
narrative; and I have conversed with so many individuals whose ideas of
Australia are totally at variance with its actual state, that I am
encouraged to indulge the hope that my observations, desultory as they
are, may be of some interest to the public. I am strengthened in this hope
by the consideration that some kind friends have enabled me to add much
valuable matter to that which I had myself collected. It is not my
intention, however, to enter at any length on the commercial or
agricultural interests of New South Wales. It may be necessary for me to
touch lightly on those important subjects, but it is my wish to connect
this preliminary chapter, as much as possible with the subjects treated of
in the body of the work, and chiefly to notice the physical structure, the
soil, climate, and productions of the colony, in order to convey to the
reader general information on these points, before I lead him into the
remote interior.

NAME OF AUSTRALIA.

It may be worthy of remark that the name "Australia," has of late years
been affixed to that extensive tract of land which Great Britain possesses
in the Southern Seas, and which, having been a discovery of the early
Dutch navigators, was previously termed "New Holland." The change of name
was, I believe, introduced by the celebrated French geographer, Malte
Brun, who, in his division of the globe, gave the appellation of
Austral Asia and Polynesia to the new discovered lands in the southern
ocean; in which division he meant to include the numerous insular groups
scattered over the Pacific.

IMPRESSIONS OF ITS EARLY VISITORS.

Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than
every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a
continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude.
Stretching from the 115th to the 153rd degree of east longitude, and from
the 10th to the 37th of south latitude, it averages 2700 miles in length
by 1800 in breadth; and balanced, as it were, upon the tropic of that
hemisphere in