y and variously coloured animals and plants. It was by
no means a solitary instance; every block which could be procured
from the bottom, in from ten to twenty fathoms, was like it."

The reflection on this exuberance of nature is striking and
true.--"What an inconceivable amount of animal life must be here
scattered over the bottom of the sea! to say nothing of that moving
through its waters; and this through spaces of hundreds of miles:
every corner and crevice, every point occupied by living beings,
which, as they become more minute, increase in tenfold abundance."

And let it be remembered, too, that those creatures have not merely
life, but enjoyment; that they are not created for any conceivable use
of man, but for purposes and pleasures exclusively suited to their own
state of existence; that they exist in millions of millions, and that
the smallest living thing among those millions, not merely exceeds in
its formation, its capacities, and its senses, all that the powers of
man can imitate, but actually offers problems of science, in its
simple organisation, which have baffled the subtlest human sagacity
since the creation, and will probably baffle it while man treads the
globe.

In the navigation along the coast, the officers had frequent meetings
with the natives, who seemed to have known but little of the English
settlements, for their conduct was exactly that of the savage. They
evidently looked with as much surprise on the ships, the boats, and
the men, as the inhabitants of Polynesia looked upon the first
navigators to their shores. They were all astonishment, much craft,
and a little hostility on safe occasions.

But some parts of the coast still invite the settler, and the
communication of this knowledge from a pen so unprejudiced as that of
the voyager, may yet be a service in directing the course of
colonisation. We are told that the tract of coast between Broad Sound
and Whitsunday Passage, between the parallels of twenty-two degrees
fifteen seconds, and twenty degrees twenty seconds, exhibits peculiar
advantages. Superior fertility, better water, and a higher rise of
tide, are its visible merits. A solid range of hills, of a pretty
uniform height, cuts off from the interior a lower undulating strip of
land from five to ten miles broad, the whole seeming to be of a high
average fertility for Australia. The grass fine, close, and abundant;
the timber large-sized and various. The coast is ind