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rule that its insect distribution is governed by the distribution of plants; where certain plants are widespread the insects which live upon them are widespread also, though absent from the intermediate areas in which the plants do not occur.

These are significant facts and very suggestive of valuable results if carefully pursued. Scarcity of food or the destroying influence of parasites and insect-devourers could alone have brought about this long-continuing balance. Hence it is in Australia that a unique opportunity is afforded for the study of economic entomology, uncomplicated very far as yet by man's introduction of competing forms from abroad. All the Australian Governments are now giving this matter attention, for though the introduced destructive pests are many, there are several native pests which are equally able to work mischief to farm, garden, and orchard. The settlers who in Western Australia are now clearing away some 400 square miles of native vegetation annually are also destroying the natural food of the native insects in those parts. The plant life grown in its place may prove quite as acceptable for insect food as that which was cleared off—at least for some forms of vegetable-feeders—and as the parasites have been destroyed and an abundance of one particular kind of food provided where once the native special food was relatively scarce the farmer finds he has made a pest of what was formerly no pest. This is now one of the great insect problems of Western Australia.

Speaking in general terms, the insect life of Western Australia is not of very great discomfort to human life, nor is it dangerous to the domestic animals.

The flora of Western Australia, like the fauna of that State, cannot be studied apart from that of all Australia.

The study of Australian botany is marked by three very distinct phases.

The continent being an island, without navigable rivers to give access inland, its vegetation became first known along the whole circuit of its coastline, and before even a glimmer of knowledge had been obtained concerning the character of its inland regions.

The second phase began after the Blue Mountains had been successfully crossed and exploring expeditions had examined the head waters of the numerous rivers which drain the inland slopes and flow out into the great plains to the west.

The third phase began when the Eastern States became self-governing and appropriated portions of their revenues to maintaining State gardens under expert botanical direction. A close study of the native flora ensued, its distribution became ascertained, and its economic limitations clearly defined. By means of the precise information thus acquired colonists were helped to a knowledge of the correct lines on which to cultivate to economic advantage such other plants as they found it necessary to introduce from abroad.

The English knowledge of the Australian flora, curiously enough, begins with the visit of William Dampier to the coast of Western Australia in the year 1688, or nineteen years before the birth of Carolus Linnæus, the founder of botanical science. Dampier in 1697 published the narrative of his voyage and illustrated it with drawings of some of the new plants brought home by him. Crude as these drawings are, and ill-preserved the specimens from which they were taken, those familiar with Australian botany find little difficulty in recognizing most of the plants figured. The casuarina, the tea-tree, the Sturt pea, and a prickly solanum are among those most easily distinguishable.

Eighty-two years after Dampier’s first visit to north-west Australia Captain Cook's expedition, having the botanists Banks and Solander on board, discovered the coast of east Australia; and at Botany Bay they made the first collection of Australian plants gathered by scientists. Altogether about 1,000 species were obtained while on the Australian coast and the beginnings of Australian botany were firmly laid. Menzies, who was botanist of Vancouver's expedition in 1771, made a further collection of plants when Vancouver discovered King George Sound, and a year later Labillardiere, the naturalist with D'Entrecasteaux's expedition, again augmented the list of known plants by the collections gathered by him on the south coast of Tasmania.

When Flinders in 1802 started his exploration of the Australian south coast there had by that time become scientifically known about 1,300 species of Australian plants. Flinders had with his expedition the now famous botanist Robert Brown, and so assiduously did Brown collect that he raised the total number of