in the woods during summer as to leave very little vegetable matter to return to earth.  On the highest mountains and in places the most remote and desolate I have always found on every dead trunk on the ground, and living tree of any magnitude also, the marks of fire; and thus it appeared that these annual conflagrations extend to every place.  In the regions of sandstone the territory is, in short, good for nothing, and is besides very generally inaccessible, thus presenting a formidable obstruction to any communication between isolated spots of a better description.

Land near Sydney has always been preferred to that which is remote, though the quality may have been equal; yet throughout the wide extent of twenty-three millions of acres only about 4,400,000 have been found worth 5 shillings per acre, and the owners of this appropriated land within the limits have been obliged to send their cattle beyond them for the sake of pasturage.

EMPLOYMENT OF CONVICTS.

From the labour necessary to form lines of communication across such a country, New South Wales still affords an excellent field for the employment of convicts; and although some of the present colonists may be against the continuance of transportation, it must be admitted that the increase and extension of population and the future prosperity of the country depends much on the completion of such public works.  The dominion of man cannot indeed be extended well over nature there without much labour of this description.  The prisoners should be worked in gangs and guarded and coerced according to some well organised system.  It can require no argument to show how much more pernicious to the general interests of mankind the amalgamation of criminals with the people of a young colony must be than with the dense population of old countries, where a better organised police and laws suited to the community are in full and efficient operation, both for the prevention and detection of crime; but the employment of convicts on public works is not inseparable from the question of allowing such people to become colonists; and whoever desires to see the noble harbour of Sydney made the centre of a flourishing country, extending from the tropic to the shores of the Southern Ocean, rather than one only of several small settlements along the coast, will not object to relieve the mother country by employing her convicts even at a greater expense than they cost the colonists at present.  Thus the evil would in time cure itself by preparing the country for such accessions of honest people from home as would reduce the tainted portion of its inhabitants to a mere caput mortuum.

NECESSITY FOR CUTTING ROADS.

With a well arranged system of roads radiating from such a harbour even the sandstone wastes, extensive though they be, might be overstepped and, the good parts being connected by roads, the produce of the tropical and temperate regions might then be brought to one common market.