million cattle, is about 700,000 cattle and three million sheep. The export of live cattle has been tried, and found expensive and risky; but, between freezing and tinning, and allowing for the demand from other colonies, as from New South Wales after the late drought, it is not, on reflection, strange, though the figures are large, if the number of cattle utilised has sometimes exceeded the available cast, and the export of sheep has left the colony with no great surplusage. A demand is springing up from countries so far apart as Austria, Natal and the Philippines. Receiving stores are being erected at Singapore and Colombo; the Japanese are acquiring a taste for meat; South Africa is thinking of Australian supplies to make up for the deficiency due to the rinderpest; and the American troops in Manilla are supplied with fresh Queensland beef in preference to the malarious flesh of the water-buffalo.
The vast territory of this colony, extending as it does for I 300 miles from north to south and 900 miles from east to west, with a coast line of 2,500 miles, of necessity includes great varieties of soil and climate. Upon the whole, especially towards the south, its physical features correspond roughly to those of New South Wales; the dividing range which separates the eastern from the western waters following the coast at a distance of from 100 to 300 miles inland. Although large herds of cattle are depastured on the eastward side of the range, the great stations of Queensland, both for cattle and sheep, lie on the cretaceous formation of the broad and slightly elevated inland plateau. The cattle from inland are easily distinguished at the meat works by their larger carcases; and vast flocks of sheep graze on the saline pastures of the interior, the squatter not infrequently numbering his sheep by the hundred thousand, while
