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CHAPTER II.
AUSTRALIA.
It is pleasant to reflect that the name Australia was selected by the gallant Flinders; though, with his customary modesty, he suggested rather than adopted it. "Had I," he says in his "Voyage to Terra Australis," "permitted myself any innovation upon the original term Terra Australis, it would have been to convert it into Australia,[1] as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth."
Though insulated, Australia is so large that many writers speak of it as a continent. It contains about[2] three millions of square miles, and the whole of Europe contains only about one million more. But for its conditions of climate and soil, and the consequent limitations of its capacity to produce food for man and to supply his various wants, it might give scope for many powerful nations. Usually in a large territory high lands exist, and from them flow perennial streams, upon which navigation from the sea is possible; cultivation follows them as naturally
- ↑ A French work of fiction, by Jaques Sadeur, published in 1693—"Nouveau Voyage de la Terre Australe"—styled the imagined inhabitants "Australiens." A translation, publiahed in London in 1693 not only used the term "Australians," but rendered "la terre Australe" into "Australia." A "Histoire dee Navigateurs aux Terres Australes," published in Paris in 1756, called the natives "Australiens," but merely called the land "la Terre Australe." Flinders may have been none of these books, and in neither of the French works in the name which pleased him given to the land.
- ↑ Computations of area are diverse and liable to be changed.
