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the Southern Ocean parallel to their more usual southern track. It is by these incursions that the creek channels in the Eremian region are occasionally flushed to overflowing, that the claypans and so-called lakes are replenished, and then truly "the wilderness blossoms as the rose." The Eremian region is, in fact, a region in which a "mild drought" is always reigning, and the plant-life indigenous to it must necessarily be of a kind adapted to withstand heat, cold, drought, or flood. Yet no fewer than 942 species of plant-life have been enumerated in the flora of this peculiar region. No fewer than 208 of them reach the north tropical coast and practically the whole of them the west and north-west coasts. It is a fact, both interesting and instructive now to remember, that it was to reach this region of prevailing south-east winds that the Dutchmen, in their voyages to the East Indies so long ago, stood so far eastward after rounding the Cape of Good Hope before bearing up northward for Java. Sometimes they kept easterly too far, and thus discovered Australia where they least expected—under their ship's keel, as in the case of Pelsart's wreck on the Abrolhos. From where the Dutchmen ordinarily made their Australian landfalls, right along northward as far as navigation toward Java or the Moluccas took them, the winds which favoured them were the winds blowing over the west end of the Eremian region, and the coast itself is the least inviting portion of all-Australia. To this fact is doubtless due the absence of Dutch desire to annex or to colonize, and thus it came about that Britain, seeking a new territory for new penal settlements to replace those lost with the American colonies, settled first the east coast and finally claimed all Australia. A better knowledge of botany and meteorology would have saved Australia to the Dutch, or, later, would certainly have given it to the French. On very small issues does history thus sometimes pivot.

The Eremian Division.—The Eremian flora is that which supports millions of sheep and cattle in eastern Australia and on to which the flocks and herds of Western Australia are continually expanding. Wherever the stock can be provided with water in this so-called "desert" of Australia there Nature has provided food for it. What is true of one part is true of all, and the ultimate pastoral resources of Western Australia within this region have not yet been even guessed at. Sheep, cattle, and horses will thrive and multiply on even the worst of the spinifex sandhills country, and the sustaining character of the feed there is exemplified by the work of the horses with which explorers have traversed Australia from north to south and from west to east. The region is essentially a grass region. Tree life occasionally covers large areas, but succulent herbage is always a local occurrence after rain or flooded creeks. In tree life the acacias predominate. The Acacia aneura or "mulga," along with a few interspersed Myoporinæ, Casuarinæ, Santalaceæ, and Eucalypti, constitutes the typical desert "scrub," which has a thin undergrowth of grass at times. In the watercourses the only large timber is to be found, and the sandy creek channels sometimes look like broad drives through an avenue of the Eucalyptus rostrata or "flood gum-tree." The south margin of this Eremian region, where it graduates into the better forested lands of the temperate zone, is dominated by dense tracts of eucalypti with slender stems and having foliage only at the top. These trees grow closely crowded and all about the same height (say 25 ft.), and are about the thickness of a man's arm. In the Eastern States this is the typical "Mallee" scrub, the trees in the Eastern States being the Eucalyptus dumosa; in the West this "mallee" is chiefly Eucalyptus oleosa. Toward the northern zone where tropical vegetation begins to appear the fan-palm (Livistona) and a fig-tree (Ficus platypoda) are the first important harbingers. The Livistona Mariæ occurs south of the Macdonnell Ranges in Central Australia, and its almost identical congener, the L. Alfredi, occurs at Mill Stream Station on the Fortescue River, near the North-West Cape.

The North Division.—The north or tropical flora of Western Australia is the diminishing progression southward of the flora of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, mixing with the Eremian flora as dis-