a notable example of evolution brought about by changed conditions.  When the sheep culture was introduced, it presently brought famine to the parrot by exterminating a kind of grub which had always thitherto been the parrot’s diet.  The miseries of hunger made the bird willing to eat raw flesh, since it could get no other food, and it began to pick remnants of meat from sheep skins hung out on the fences to dry.  It soon came to prefer sheep meat to any other food, and by and by it came to prefer the kidney-fat to any other detail of the sheep.  The parrot’s bill was not well shaped for digging out the fat, but Nature fixed that matter; she altered the bill’s shape, and now the parrot can dig out kidney-fat better than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or anybody else, for that matter—­even an Admiral.

And there was another curiosity—­quite a stunning one, I thought:  Arrow-heads and knives just like those which Primeval Man made out of flint, and thought he had done such a wonderful thing—­yes, and has been humored and coddled in that superstition by this age of admiring scientists until there is probably no living with him in the other world by now.  Yet here is his finest and nicest work exactly duplicated in our day; and by people who have never heard of him or his works:  by aborigines who lived in the islands of these seas, within our time.  And they not only duplicated those works of art but did it in the brittlest and most treacherous of substances—­glass:  made them out of old brandy bottles flung out of the British camps; millions of tons of them.  It is time for Primeval Man to make a little less noise, now.  He has had his day.  He is not what he used to be.  We had a drive through a bloomy and odorous fairy-land, to the Refuge for the Indigent—­a spacious and comfortable home, with hospitals, etc., for both sexes.  There was a crowd in there, of the oldest people I have ever seen.  It was like being suddenly set down in a new world—­a weird world where Youth has never been, a world sacred to Age, and bowed forms, and wrinkles.  Out of the 359 persons present, 223, were ex-convicts, and could have told stirring tales, no doubt, if they had been minded to talk; 42 of the 359 were past 80, and several were close upon 90; the average age at death there is 76 years.  As for me, I have no use for that place; it is too healthy.  Seventy is old enough—­after that, there is too much risk.  Youth and gaiety might vanish, any day—­and then, what is left?  Death in life; death without its privileges, death without its benefits.  There were 185 women in that Refuge, and 81 of them were ex-convicts.

The steamer disappointed us.  Instead of making a long visit at Hobart, as usual, she made a short one.  So we got but a glimpse of Tasmania, and then moved on.

CHAPTER XXX.

Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.