notwithstanding the consumption of wine on board her fleets and throughout her vast regions is immense.”  This is another illustration of the old adage that lookers-on see most of the game, for this observant Frenchman has recorded an opinion the very truth of which comes well home to us.  His remarks, moreover, open up a vista of what a great trade might be done with India in connection with our wines; indeed, it is this interchange of products which keeps the circulation going in the blood-vessels of commercial life.

Yet, although the vine was thus early started in Australia, it has since made but little progress, relatively speaking, in comparison with the great industry of wool-growing, and it will be appropriate to make this reference to the grape and the fleece conjointly, for the same name—­that of John Macarthur—­is intimately associated with both.  In a small way sheep-breeding had been initiated soon after the settlement of Australia.  But it was John Macarthur, by his introduction of the merino sheep in 1797, who gave the first impetus which led to the subsequent creation of the Australian wool trade.  It was John Macarthur, too, who formed the first vineyard in Australia at Camden Park in 1815; though, as I have already said, the growth of the vine industry has not advanced with anything like the same rapidity as that of wool; if it had, Australia would now occupy a position second to none in the world.

It seems most fitting and opportune also to mention the fact that at the very time I am writing there is a proposal in the Sydney morning Herald to do something to perpetuate our gratitude to John Macarthur.  It is not often that one man has the opportunity of establishing two such great industries as wine-making and wool-growing.  The benefits to Australia which have followed from the latter are altogether beyond calculation; for which alone the name of John Macarthur deserves to hold a place in the memory of Australians for ever, and if the wine industry had only been developed in like proportion, Australia’s prosperity would have marvellously increased.  Knowing, therefore, what John Macarthur has done for Australia, it is to be hoped that before these lines see the light of day what is now proposed will be an accomplished fact.

The next most notable occurrence in the history of Australian viticulture is undoubtedly the action of James Busby who in 1828, says Mr. T.A.  Coghlan in his wealth and progress of new south Wales, returned from Europe “with a large collection of cuttings from the most celebrated vineyards of France, Spain, the Rhine valley, and other parts of the continent of Europe, and started, on his estate at Kirkton, in the Hunter River district, a vineyard which has been the nursery of the principal vineyards of the Colony.”  This was a more important event than would be imagined from a bare recital of the fact, for Busby has conferred upon