Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1890 — A STRANGE LAND. [ARTICLE]

A STRANGE LAND.

Features of Australia Plowerl Without Odor—No Shade. Australia fa a country in which nature has established conditions unknown elsewhere, says the Boston Jour- ■ BaL-and where civilization must adapt itself to surroundings whieh it find* novel and strange It is a country full of absurdities "in animal, vegetable, and human life. Its native rabe, it point of intelligence and development of resources, is far below even the cave-dwellers juuLthe people of the stone age of Europe. Its animals perpetuate types which disappeared from every other part of the glooe some millions of years ago. Its trees and plants are representative of specie* found elsewhere only in ch.ilk and coal measures. Hardly anything here has the character and quality of its relations in otherlands. Although the trees and , ftowers-are chiefly those of the temperate zone, the birds are. for the most part, ol the tropics, and flash the gorgeous colors of the parrot and the cockatoo through the dull foliage ol sadtoned eucalyptus. The birds have no song, and such notes as they possess seem like wierd echoes from a period when, reptiles were assuming wings and filling the tree tops with a strange jargon, before heard only in the swamps and fens. The flowers have no scent, while the leaves of every tree are fuil of odor. The trees casi no shade, since every le if is set at edge against the sun, and their leaves, but their baric* which stripping off in loDg scales, expose the naked wood beneath, and adds to the ghostly effect which the forest already holds in the pallid hues of its foliage. The contour of the country is of one that is but newly risen from the waves. Its thousands and,thousands of square miles, level as a table and set witn no other growth than the gray eucalyptus, looks like the uplifted bed of some great sea and is as monotonous is the unrelieved expanse itself. Here and there are low hills, which show in their sides and in the country about them the evidences of ancient lava flows. Elsewhere are piled up masses of bowlders, which show the long-ago courses of glaciers over the face of the land. Everything seems prehistoric, hoary with age, and forgotten. To the traveler from other lands an impression comes that he is visiting a country which had eeased in its development long years ago.