"but you omit all the exceptions that may be made in favour of poor New Holland, which, after all, has a certain number of valuable gifts in each of these kinds, even as already discovered; and you are to remember, too, that as to much the larger part of its surface, it is still wholly unexplored. If now, too, we know enough of it to risk the assertion, that all its beauties, in plants and animals, are comparatively few, still they are not nothing. It must be confessed to you, in the meantime, that the quadrupeds of New Holland make but a scanty and meagre show; and that instead of the beautiful, the noble, the graceful, and even the picturesque proportions, magnitudes, ornaments, and colours, of our elks, our deer, and antelopes, our oxen, horses, and sheep, our camels and our asses (for I will not leave the shaggy donkey out of the catalogue); to say nothing of the elephant, the zebra, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, which adorn and dignify our Northern Hemisphere; we find no quadruped, in New Holland, larger or more beautiful than the limping cangaroo, its wombats, peramelas, flying phalangistas, echnidas, and ornithorynchuses. Even its beasts of prey are small, and, as it were, contemptible. It has neither bear, nor wolf, nor fox; and much less the kingly lion, the glorious tiger, the beautiful leopard, or alike beautiful panther; though some of our emigrants have carried out fox-hounds, to where there is no chase but for cangaroo-dogs; and though the charming poet of the "Pleasures of Hope," in a later production of his muse, has pictured "panthers" as now lapping at the river sides of New Holland; an event which, even in the future, can never happen till some panther, carried in our ships to the coast of New Holland, shall afterward slip the cage of its showman, or the den of some Zoological Garden, to be established

(and perhaps shortly!) beneath the stars of the Antarctic Pole.-"

Mr. Paulett was uttering the last syllables of his instructive speech, when, enlivened, I suppose, by the tones of his voice, and the store of new ideas which I was collecting from all I heard, I, the Robin-redbreast, who am here reporting it to the reader;-I, once again, sung out the sugary cadence that had opened the conversation, but that now, to my real regret, brought it to a sudden close! To find that there was a part of the world in which, at least as Mr. Paulett pretended, there are no such things as Robin-red-breasts, was an occurrence so startling to my fancy, that I involuntarily hopped a little from twig to twig, and ejaculated a few hasty notes, either incredulous of the unexpected history; or shocked, liked Mrs. Paulett, at the notion of so strange a country; or inwardly rejoicing that I was far away from it! But the effect of my vivacity was very different from any thing that I either designed or wished. Richard, with all his philosophy, did not refrain from rising off his chair, and calling out, a little loudly, "There is Robin again! there is Robin!" and Emily, though anxious, upon this occasion, to appear more discreet than her brother, as well as more attentive to their mamma's advice, still permitted herself to be drawn, a step or two, toward the nearest window. Mr. and Mrs. Paulett recollected that breakfast had been for some time finished; Mr. Paulett had business; Mrs. Paulett had orders for the servants; and the children had lessons that could not wait. Every one arose, and I, too, took to my wings. The family left the breakfast-parlour; and I, for my part, flew into the adjacent grove.

CHAP. II.

What cannot arts and industry perform?

BEATTIE.

THE following day, at the same hour, was as bright as that which had preceded it; and I was again sunning myself about the maple-tree, and indulging in the freshness of the morning air, when the family at Burton Cottage assembled at their breakfast. My little song was again heard; and such are the links by which ideas are connected with each other, and so easily do outward things enkindle inward, that there seemed to want but this, in order that the whole party should resume its yesterday's reflections upon singing-birds; upon Robin-red-breasts; and upon New Holland, which is without the whole!

"You allowed, however, my dear," said Mrs. Paulett, "that New Holland is really a singular corner of the globe, with many blemishes, and many imperfections; at least comparatively so, and as taking all the remainder of the earth into the account?"

"the

"Oh! doubtless," answered her husband, whole of that is true; but let us sum up, on the other side, a part of those things which may either soften our sentence upon it for the present, or encourage our hopes for it, as to the future. New Holland has really every aspect of being comparatively a new country; a country newly raised (in the comparison with more

Northern continents and islands) above the level of the sea. That interior hollowness, or basin-like formation of the surface, which is the cause of the running of so many of its rivers inland, instead of to the sea, is not the least of the circumstances which may justify such an idea; for it is common, both with the sea, and with great rivers, to raise, by means of their deposits, either in storms or inundations, their immediate shores and banks above the level of the remoter soil which they thus engirdle. It is thus, so often, with the downs, or dunes, or hills upon the seacoasts; and it is thus that the immediate banks of the Missisippi (for example) are natural dykes, or higher than the lands behind them. But, in such a structure of its surface, New Holland is not peculiar; or, rather, the peculiarity consists only in the lateness of the day at which we see it. In the heart of Northern Asia, and lying between Northern Mongolia and Northern China, quite to the Chinese Wall, is a vast and hollow tract of country, in which every thing demonstrates its being the dry bed of an ancient sea. The Mongols, upon the authority of tradition, assert that it anciently contained a sea, and add, that it will receive a sea again. The Chinese call it Han Hae, or the Dried-up Sea; and assert, that the people of Corea, if so disposed, by availing themselves of this inland basin, and opening a passage to it, through their mountains, from the great ocean upon its coast, might inundate, not only all Mongolia, but all Russia at the same time! This vast hollow, the Shan Mo of the Chinese, and True Gobi, Cobi, Desert, or Desert of Gobi, or Cobi (written Kobi on our maps), is in the midst of the more extended Gobi, from which it is separated by the Boossoo Shilolm, or Girdle of Rocks: Gobi,

in the Mongolian tongue, signifying the same with Sahara, in the north of Africa; that is, a country without wood and water; while by the opposite term, Changgae, is to be understood a fertile, hilly, wooded, and well-watered country. In the True Gobi, or the Mo of the Chinese, which, however, is small, as compared with the whole country, the sands and clays are abundant in salt; there are little salt lakes still left; and the plants are a peculiar species of the genera that are found upon the sea-coasts *. I compare," added Mr. Paulett," with this changing state of a sunken and internal portion of the North of Asia, the internal basin of New Holland."

"But what say you to the natives?" pursued Mrs. Paulett.

"I believe, in the first place," answered her husband, "that they are decried to excess by the Europeans; and, in the second place, I account for their deficiencies, bodily and intellectual, such as they are, from the acknowledged deficiencies of their country, and from their depressed and unassisted situation. I believe that they belong to the great family of man, and not to that of the oran-otang, to which so many would consign them. There are persons so ignorant as to assert that they are without any form, or even sentiment, of religion; as if man any where, or at any time, has subsisted in such a state; and as if, in point of fact, these very persons did not, in the same breath, inform us of circumstances which make manifest their possession of a religion! In a cave, in a certain direction, has been found a carving of a figure

*Recent Journey of Dr. Bunge, from St. Petersburg to the Frontiers of China.