these efforts be blessed with happy purpose.  All is not known yet even in Australia.  The number of “observers” who believe that snakes swallow their young in time of danger, and allow them to emerge when it is past, and that the end of the death adder to avoid is the tail, which is fitted with a slightly curved spur, become fewer every year; but we are still sincere in many of the honourable points of ignorance.  Some discredit such facts as climbing fish, oysters “growing” on living trees, birds hatching eggs without sitting on them, egg-laying mammals and mammals producing young from eggs within their bodies, plants that sow the seed of continents to be—­yet these facts are of everyday occurrence here.

As to climate, will general credence be given to the statement that Dunk Island is more “temperate” than Melbourne?  We experience neither the extreme heat nor the extreme cold of the metropolis of Victoria—­nearly 2000 miles to the south; we have four or five times the volume of rain, yet a greater number of fine days—­days without rain.  The general principle that where the rainy days are fewest the amount of rain is greatest, is apt to be forgotten.  During 1903 the rainfall of Dunk Island amounted to 153 inches.  What is meant (to follow the phrase of Huxley) when one says in technical language that the rainfall of a place was 153 inches for a certain year?  Such a statement means simply that if all the rain which fell on any level piece of ground in that place could be collected—­none being lost by drying up, none running off the soil and none soaking into it—­then at the end of the year it would form a layer covering that piece of ground to the uniform depth of 12 feet 9 inches!  An inch of rain signifies 114 tons, or 27,000 gallons per acre!

Let me repeat that in 1903 the rainfall here totalled 153 inches.  During the same period the mean rainfall of the State of Victoria was 27.36 inches.  In one locality, reputed to be the wettest, 42.11 inches were registered, and occasioned no little surprise.  In another Australian state, among the natural advantages of land offered for close settlement, was catalogued an annual rainfall of 18 inches; in another an official inducement of an average rainfall of 27 inches was offered, in yet another 24 inches, with a not too shrewd note that 15 inches of rain was ample.

Some of the denizens of a dry area in Victoria find it hard to credit the simple facts recorded by my rain-gauge.  The rainfall for the month of January 1903, on Dunk Island was 26.60 inches, only 0.76 inches short of the mean for the whole year in Victoria, and more than twice the quantity that blessed the thirsty soil in some parts of Queensland.  The total rainfall of the wettest locality in Victoria was 42.11 inches.  Here the month of March alone gave 44.90 inches.

At Thargomindah (South-Western Queensland) 11.37 inches were registered for 1903, and 9.82 inches for 1904.  The two driest months of Dunk Island fell short by a trifle more than 2 inches of the total fall for 1904 for that parched area.  At Eulolo (Mid-Western Queensland) 13.68 inches represented the sum of the blessing for 1903, while during 24 hours in December that year the Dunk Island gauge registered just 11 inches, and that quantity was 3 inches more than could he spared for Eulolo for the whole of 1904.