AUSTRALIA, AND THE KANGAROO.

THE vast island, or rather continent of Australia, differs from the other portions of the known world in many important particulars—in its peculiarities of soil, climate, and geographical features, and in its animal and vegetable productions.

For instance, its largest rivers, instead of widening and deepening as they flow onward from their source, and pouring a broader stream into the ocean, gradually diminish after leaving the hill country, and finally disappear, before they reach the coast, in chains of pools and vast tracts of morass, or else diffuse their waters into a broad but shallow lake, which partly evaporates, and partly creeps or soaks into the sea by some narrow and insignificant outlet, choked up with sand. Besides this, many of the Australian rivers, as well as the inland lakes, are as salt as the ocean itself.

In most other countries we find that well-watered and fertile districts abound in the plains, and that desolation and sterility are associated with high lands, mountains,

and rocks. In Australia the reverse of all this holds good. The mountain districts, and the terraces at their feet, by which the traveller sinks into the dead level country, are fertile, well watered, and picturesque, abounding with vegetable productions of a peculiar character, quite distinct from those of our hemisphere, and enlivened by birds of brilliant plumage.

On the other hand, the plains, which are of immense extent, and with an horizon as unvaried as that of the wide ocean, are, for the most part, alternately arid deserts or impassable swamps, and in either case are dreary and desolate. During the long droughts, which periodically prevail in Australia, they are a dry waste, where “the dust groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together;" hardly a bird is seen, and the vegetable kingdom is almost annihilated; the beds of the exhausted rivers are crusted with salt, and on the dusty banks wither in heaps the parched stems of the dead marsh-plants.

After the wet season, which follows the years of drought, the same district generally becomes an almost impassable bog, full of water-holes, or else an immense inland sea, in which stand rotting the bare trunks of full-grown trees. A few months afterwards, and this inland sea will probably have become a grassy plain.

Australia, in fact, appears to be really new land-not merely new to us, but of much more recent formation than our northern continents, and to be undergoing at this very time a state of transition, in which, by means at first-sight inadequate to work such mighty changes, this country is becoming gradually but surely fitted, more and more, for the abode of man; and we may anticipate the time when its now barren plains will produce food and sustenance for nations as numerous as those which crowd the most populous districts of Europe or Asia.

"Known unto God are all His works, from the foundation of the world;" and may not we, his rational creatures, take glimpses of the wonderful working of His creative power, still in active exercise upon the earth? May we not, without presumption, speculate on the benevolent provisions of that all-seeing wisdom, by the operation of which, through ages from the earliest dawn of time until now, this beautiful and glorious earth has been prepared, and is yet preparing, for the reception of His creaturesfitted more and more to minister to their production, their sustenance, and their delight?

It would appear, then, that at a period comparatively recent, (recent, that is, contrasted with the time when the other continents took their present general aspect,) the