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of extreme fertility which has seldom or never been sur passed in-any region of the globe. In the end of 1840, I happened to be in the neighbourhood of Paramatta; the thermometer stood at 90° in the shade ; the atmosphere in the town was filled with an attenuated dust from the streets: orange trees, aloes, myrtles, cactuses, cypresses, and other plants, that prefer a dry climate and soil, were growing in splendid luxuriance. Yet here, under this burning sun, my attention was directed to a large field of oats, bearing a crop equal in strength of stalk, closeness, and verdure, to any that I have ever seen in Scotland. The government domain of Paramatta had just yielded a fine crop of hay, and the surrounding uplands had a pleasing, verdant aspect, yet it appears, by the Meteorological Journal for the month of October, that but a very small quantity of rain had fallen. The soil round Paramatta consists of a thick and deep bed of clayey or gravelly diluvium. We cannot account for its fertility, except by supposing that in warm, but not torrid climates, nature has ways and means as yet but little understood, of com pensating in some degree for want of rain. It would appear that plants which are considered to thrive best in cold and moist climates, like that of Scotland, have a cer tain power of accommodating themselves to a climate of an opposite character : the willow attains a great size even in the streets of Sydney, and the British oak grows, but not very vigorously, in the domain and other places in the neighbourhood. No parts of New South Wales, and this remark is ap plicable to every colonized portion of New Holland, in cluding South Australia, can be pronounced unproductive, h 3