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During my four years' stay, from 1880 to 1884, in Australia, where I was sent by the University of Christiania to study the fauna and the aborigines of that continent, I had the opportunity of living for about twelve months. among the cannibals in the northeastern district of Queensland, very often in parts where no white man had ever before put his foot. It is chiefly about my experience among these people that I intend to tell you to-night, but I must necessarily trouble you with a short introduction about the country itself, its scenery, its vegetation and its climate.

In Europe people seem to have very vague ideas about Australia and life out there. I recollect once being asked in Norway, my native country, whether forks and knives were used in Australia. Such a question alone shows how little people really know about that part of the world. They have no idea of the

wealth, the advanced state of civilization and the luxury to be found in the southern part of that continent. Australia is, above all, the land of minerals and pastures. I need hardly refer to its enormous amount of gold and to its millions of sheep and cattle, which supply the markets of the world. In the South you can get whatever you may want to make your life comfortable. Ladies have their dresses made in London and Paris. I remember having once at a race-course seen a lady with a dress that was said to cost £1000. But the farther north and the farther west we go, the more we get away from civilization, till, at last, we meet the lowest and most degraded type of humanity-a people in the most primitive and savage state of life—a people whose highest conception of numbers does not extend beyond 5.

You may compare Australia with a gigantic dinnerplate. The interior is a flat country of medium height (300 to 2,150 feet), rising towards the border. The edge of the "plate" is highest in the S. E., where, in the Mount Kosziusko Range, Mount Townsend rises to 7,059 feet above the level of the sea. Very distinct is the edge of the "plate" along the eastern coast, where stretches a continuous, although not very high, mountainous country, from Victoria through the eastern part of New South Wales and Queensland into the York peninsula, which bounds the great Carpentarian Gulf towards the East. The whole mountain district is by the Australian geographers (c. g. G. Sutherland,) called by the common name of the "Great Dividing Range." The single parts of this mountain ridge have different names, e. g. the Australian Alps, where Vic

toria and New South Wales meet together, and the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

Round the lower part of the Carpentarian Gulf and in a part of the southern district of Australia the “edge of the plate" is broken, and low and flat country here stretches from the sea far into the interior. On the other side rises from the "bottom of the plate" in Central Australia some higher land, which, however, nowhere so far as is known reaches 3000 feet.

This Dividing Range stretches along the eastern coast of Australia at a distance of from 50 to some 300 miles inland. It forms, as a rule, the watershed between the eastern and western waters, but there are chains of mountains visible from the coast that often are of greater elevation than the range itself, such as the abovementioned Blue Mountains, where the streams, on their way to the Pacific, break through the mountains in picturesque chasms. The Dividing Range is sometimes not very easily traced. The spurs coming from it, as well as detached mountains near the coast, are often much higher and are frequently taken for the main range. This range, by throwing off rain and creating streams, has made the eastern part of Australia far more fertile than the western.

Layers from the coal period have a great extension in Queensland, and the northeastern part of New South Wales; so Australia, besides her other mineral wealth, possesses also the "black diamonds." In several places strata from the mesozoic period of the earth's history have been traced.

The remains of animal and vegetable life found in the older strata agree as a whole with those found in other

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