locations. They speedily advanced northward and southward along the coast, and penetrated inland to the base of the Blue mountains. This chain, which runs parallel to the shore, at the distance of from fifty to seventy miles, sometimes approaching much nearer, long formed the back-ground of the colony. Efforts were early and repeatedly made by the authorities, but in vain, to pass it, till at length the obstacle was deemed insurmountable, and the regions excluded from access and view became invested with a kind of mysterious character. The difficulty was not created by the height of the mountains (for the elevations are comparatively moderate), but by a labyrinth of profound ravines, often narrow, with nearly perpendicular sides, running one into another in the most confusing manner, or leading only to precipitous escarpments, perfectly impossible to scale. Military men and engineers were alike foiled. Lieutenant Daws made the first attempt to reconnoitre, in 1789, with a detachment of troops, but was unable to penetrate through the first range of hills; captain Tench, in the following year, met with no better success; colonel Paterson, accustomed to the hardships of African travel, with some Scotch highlanders, was completely baffled in 1793; and Mr. Bass, the bold and successful adventurer by sea, was defeated in the enterprise in 1796, after displays of singular daring. Some frightful precipices were ascended by means of iron hooks fastened to his arms; and deep chasms were passed by being let down into them with ropes. It became a settled conviction that the barrier could never be surmounted, especially as the natives themselves, who had become known to the colonists, were wholly ignorant of any pass. But they highly excited curiosity by wild and fabulous intimations of an immense lake beyond the mountains, with white men on its banks, inhabiting houses like those of the Europeans.

At length, in 1813, the twenty-sixth year of the colony, it was visited by a distressing season of drought. The lands from the sea-coast to the base of the hills were burnt up; the secondary water-courses entirely failed; and the cattle perished in great numbers for want of pasturage. But this temporary evil was the means of effecting an important and permanent benefit. In the emergency, three enterprising individuals-Messrs. Bloxland, Wentworth, and Lanson-combined their efforts to penetrate the highlands, and open the country to the westward for their flocks and herds. By keeping steadily in view what all preceding explorers had overlooked, namely, the parting of the waters flowing eastward to the ocean from those having an opposite direction, or towards the interior, they succeeded in gaining a main ridge; and after a difficult route of more than fifty miles, the travellers came to a terminating point in the mountains, the rugged brow of a precipice, commanding a wide extent of open grassy country outspread before them. A practicable road was soon constructed by convict labour to the pastoral downs, in the midst of which the town of Bathurst was founded, on the banks of a river called the Macquarie, after the governor of that name; and the sources of the Lachlan, more to the south,

were discovered.

The first extensive journey into the interior was

made by Mr. Oxley, the surveyor-general, in 1817, with a view to trace the course of the Lachlan. That river was followed through long, tedious windings, till the country became a dead level, and the channel lost its continuity in nearly impassable morasses, the water becoming stagnant and unfit for use. Conceiving that the stream dissipated itself in interior swamps, the idea of further progress was abandoned, though little more than twenty miles would have brought the party to the Morrumbidgee river, not then known in any part of its course, which receives the drainage of the Lachlan marshes. Upwards of four hundred miles inland were made upon this occasion; and for five weeks, in traversing the low steppes, not a dry spot was found on which to encamp at the close of the day. Nineteen years afterwards, a traveller in the same route accidentally met with the inscription on a tree, the letters of which were as fresh as if newly cut, "J. Oxley, W. Evans, May 17, 1817." In the following year, the surveyor was despatched to trace the course of the Macquarie, and it was found to enter a similarly level country, over which the river spread itself far and wide. He explored this expanse of shoal water in a boat, amid reeds of such height, that, having at last totally lost sight of land and trees, he was obliged to return to his companions, left encamped on Mount Harris, a detached hill on the banks of the stream. Having thus followed two rivers to their apparent terminations in lagoons, to which neither boundary nor shore could be perceived, the idea of a vast sea or lake occupying the interior of Aus tralia naturally originated. These journeys, made in winter and during the wet season, viewed in connection with subsequent experience, strikingly illustrate some of the physical peculiarities and changes of the region. So heavy are the rains in the mountains, and so rapid and tremendous the consequent rush of water to the lowlands, that the flood advances like a moving cataract, with an elevation of many feet, sweeping everything before it. Oxley was nearly overtaken by one of these inundations, and would have perished but for being providentially at the time within easy distance of a neighbouring hill. Yet at a subsequent date, in summer, when captain Sturt ascended mount Harris, such had been the drought, that the whole country it commanded presented an expanse of dried-up surface. The extensive and apparently interminable lagoon which had been descended in a boat was a large and blasted plain, on which the sun's rays fell with intense heat; and the Macquarie was not in existence at all as a river, being cut up into a succession of water-holes, few and far between!

Soon afterwards, minor excursions made by pri vate individuals illustrated the country southward of the colonized territory; the Morrumbidgee was discovered, and the fine tracts of land watered by it, named the Brisbane Downs, which have since proved of such value to the grazier. But in 1824, Messrs. Hovell and Hume, two agriculturists, effected the more important enterprise of finding their way to the stream, since called the Murray, entering beyond it a lightly-timbered district, abundantly clothed with grassy vegetation, and well supplied with streamlets, now included in the colony of Victoria. They finally reached the

elements of fertility, of which the common features are sand-hills, bare rocks, and tracts of dense scrub, or brushwood. In 1841, Mr. Eyre traversed the sea-board from the western limit of South Australia to king George's Sound, upwards of a thousand miles, enduring through the latter half of the journey the most distressing privations, in which he was attended only by a native boy. The country was found to be generally devoid of timber, being barren table-land densely clothed with scrub, without a river or a river-course for six hundred miles, and fresh water only to be met with after long intervals.

At this period count Strzchecki, a native of Prussian Poland, alike eminent for science and philanthropy, was diligently exploring in detail New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, a task which involved five years of continued observation, during a tour of seven thousand miles performed on foot. His "Physical Description" of the two countries gives the result of his labours, a work which will long remain a text-book in relation to them. This nobleman, in the year 1840, discovered the district called Gipps' Land, after the governor of that name, now an important section of the Victoria colony, and a region of magnificent prairies. It was then so difficult of access, owing to being walled in by ranges covered with scrub, interwoven with grasses, and encumbered with fallen trees, that the discoverer was obliged to abandon his pack-horses and collections in order to get out of it by the route adopted. It required twenty-six days of hard labour to cut a passage, at the rate of two or three miles a day, during which the party was in imminent danger of perishing by famine and exhaustion.

A LECTURER OF THE OLD SCHOOL. A FEW years ago there died, in good circumstances and at an advanced age, Mr. John Bird, for upwards of thirty years an itinerant lecturer on astronomy. He had in the course of his chequered career professionally visited nearly every town in the United Kingdom. His engagements were always numerous, and he was looked up to by the tribe of itinerant lecturers who followed in his wake as a sort of Coryphoeus. He travelled latterly in his own plain, respectable-looking four-wheel chaise, drawn by a useful hack; and on making his periodical appearance in a town, he almost invariably won the respect of the inhabitants, by his mode of propitiating their patronage. His obese, burly figure, encased in unexceptionable broadcloth and kerseymere; his large, good-humoured face, radiant with smiles; and, in later years, his venerable head and powdered hair, were externals that seldom failed to obtain him a respectful and even friendly reception. He carried his astronomical apparatus in the box of his chaise, and that capacious receptacle was stored with a collection of mysterious mechanism calculated to excite the wonderment of anybody who might happen to look into such a Pandora's box. But the strange materials in question were, in fact, articles connected with the illustration of the science of astronomy. A magic-lantern, an orrery, lots of small oblong boxes containing astronomical slides, a set of tin vessels resembling domestic pipkins, but which were substitutes for

stars and planets;-such were the paraphernalia carried by our travelling lecturer. But however ridiculous or insignificant these curiosities looked, they produced, when set in proper arrangement and action before an audience, an instructive phantasmagoria.

The ordinary lecture upon astronomy would proceed somewhat in the following way. A scant audience has assembled in the school-room of a provincial academy. A plain, roughly-constructed wooden apparatus, intended to illustrate the motion of the earth, stands in obscurity in front of a glazed-calico medium painted all round with the signs of the zodiac, and dimly illuminated from behind by the indispensable magic-lantern. The dark shadow of the lecturer can be seen only by the fitful light thrown on the scene. He discourses on his sublime theme in a thoroughly monotonous and mechanical manner, and elucidates science merely in the elementary way. He is not overburdened with enthusiasm, for, unfortunately, his business is to huckster the stars for daily bread. A sleepy silence prevails among the auditory, broken only by the unmusical voice of the itinerant, and varied by the rattling of the slides through the aforesaid magic-lantern, the uneasy shuffling of feet, the whispering of the school-boys, and the loud and frequent snoring of the village schoolmaster. At last, the lecture is over; the people drowsily go away; the poor astronomer picks up his scattered worlds, tumbles them, together with sundry erratic planets and comets, into a box, and, slinging the latter across his back, trudges away, probably the same night, bound for the next town or village on his route. Such was the routine pur sued by our venerable friend for many a year, before lecturing had attained that brilliancy and efficiency which it may be said to have done in our own day.

Mr. Bird was born of humble parents, in a little town in Lincolnshire, towards the close of the last century. When first his strong natural abilities and untutored study of celestial phenomena were discovered, namely, in the year 1814, he was a journeyman carpenter, living with a wife and young family in the town of A- in Berkshire, to which place he had migrated. A leading trades man in the place, himself an amateur in science, became the accidental means of eliciting the peculiar genius of Bird and bringing him into notice. This liberal-minded individual discovered in the journeyman carpenter, at work upon a new staircase in his house, a mechanic of a superior order. By self-taught means, Bird had made an astrono mical machine, such as a mathematical mind only could accurately construct. It was what is technically named by astronomers a Tellurian. The poor carpenter had lathed his machine into shape simply by the help of an old print on a leaf of Ferguson's Astronomy. When his patron was first shown the model, he was at once struck with its ingenuity, and the more so that an untaught mind should have been able to accomplish what ordinarily could only be done by the help of scientific knowledge. Bird was induced to pub licly exhibit his model, and it was pronounced perfect in all respects; the dial-plate proved to be mathematically divided, and to consist of the requisite number of concentric circles, which are

necessary to the explanation of zodiacal position and solar and sidereal time.

The only publicity Bird had hitherto obtained in consequence of his supposed occult inventive powers, came from a party of his brother mechanics, who had surrounded him, at a country roadside inn, and amused themselves by what is called "bringing out" their comrade. Their absurd reception had modified the vanity of the latter, for the workmen no more understood the explanations given of the use of a tellurian, than they did the principle of flying in the air. They merely laughed and joked at their comrade for his folly in setting up as a sort of a magician, as they termed it.

Encouraged by the reception of higher minds, Bird cared little now for the past ignorant opposition. Not satisfied with having made one astronomical instrument, he believed himself capable of still better things, and his whole thoughts were bent on the construction of an orrery. At this idea he worked night and day, assisted by the advice and pecuniary aid of his patron. In the course of a few weeks there came out of his hands a noble and valuable piece of mechanism, designed to give motion to the spheres, in miniature imitation of the eternal principles of celestial phenomena. This was the proposed orrery. At the time there did not exist half-a-dozen such instruments, probably, in the world. But it should be noticed, en passant, that the orrery was still deficient in some minor particulars. Although the machinery was complete, the objects which it would have to work were wanting. The planets must be represented by illuminated figures of some kind or other. But how could the effect be produced? The question sorely puzzled the head that had accomplished so much. Bird at last, having exhausted his own ingenuity upon the point, called into requisition that of his patron, and the latter, after due consideration of the difficulty, saw his way out of it, and put Bird's mind at rest by showing him how the planets were to be subjugated to his will. He sent for a tinman. A set of square hollow tubes of tin, perforated at the face, were made. These, illuminated from within by little oil lamps, and fixed on the several arms of the orrery, of course were capable of producing on a calico medium, in the dark, the much desiderated transparencies.

Oxford and Cambridge. Astronomical science was in a backward state at both seats of learning, nearly half a century ago, and the circumstance will account for the selection of a lecturer who did not profess scholarship or classical acquirements. But although our self-educated astronomer had attained neither Greek, Latin, nor the mathematics even, as taught at college, he secured at the universities all the success he could have wished. The collegians attended his lectures, and the "heads of houses" gave him complimentary testimonials, little short of the usual university titles. It is proper here to notice how considerable has been the advance in the study and knowledge of astronomy at the universities, since the above occurrence. The discovery of new planets, the abstruse calculations by which the stellar observations were assisted, and the wondrous secrets of the heavens unveiled to human eyes, have been due to the encouragement of the study of celestial phenomena at Oxford and Cambridge. Mr. Adams and professor Challis are living instances of erudite collegiate students of astronomy. Their discoveries, therefore, brilliantly testify to the close attention that has been given of late years to the above science in the universities. Contrast a report of the Royal Astronomical Society for 1853 with one for 1823, and it will be perceived what advances have been made in this respect.

But to return to our lecturer. He certainly had little learning; his qualifications consisting in reverent admiration for, and enthusiastic ardour in pursuing and illustrating, astronomical truths. Moreover, he possessed an inventive mind, a retentive memory, genuine natural humour, versatility, and readiness. There was, however, a want of refinement in his speech and manner. Still, notwithstanding these drawbacks, in those days his capacities were sufficient to insure him the reputation of a public favourite. His lectures were always extemporaneous; which could not be said of many other lecturers who had started up, and were obliged to acknowledge him as their Mentor. Mr. Bird, in truth, raised a host of imitators, though none of them possessed the originality of his mind.

We must now suppose Bird fairly launched in his new profession, and follow him into the midst of its vicissitudes. Amongst his engagements were two that emanated from the universities of

afterwards received a graceful mark of the duke's consideration, in the gift of a pair of valuable globes, bran-new from Cary's shop in St. Jamesstreet. Bird was also honoured with the patronage of William the Fourth. He occasionally lectured before the royal family at the Pavilion at Brighton. We remember, indeed, a characteristic story told in reference to Bird's visits to the homes of royalty. He usually in the season of Lent pro