or hoard them with desperate tenacity. 'Natives' who are ready to accept the gravest charge without a grain of self-distrust; 'natives' to whom responsibility is a misery and a burden. Some there are who from childhood to old age scarcely glance at any literary product except a newspaper. Born on the same stream, or tending the same herds, shall be those whose every waking thought is more or less connected with books; to whom the unvisited regions of the Old World, through such glorious guides, are rendered common and familiar. There is no generic native Australian definition, such as we carelessly apply to Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, or Germans, when we call the first practical, the second 'go-ahead,' the third gay, the fourth solid. The Australian, perhaps, more nearly resembles the Briton, from whom he has chiefly sprung, than any other sub-variety of mankind.
There may be a slight but noticeable tendency to variation, but it smacks of progressive development rather than of retrogression. Let it be remembered that the inhabitants of the principal subdivisions of Britain have mingled and intermarried in Australia to a greater degree than is possible in the mother-country. Doubtless English and Scotch, Scotch and Irish, and so on, continuously form alliances in Britain; but there scarcely can have been such a thorough sifting up together, such intermixture of blood there, as where the three divisions, having been imported in rateably even quantities, have intermarried, for nearly a century. The thorough welding of Celt and Saxon, Dane and Norseman, Ancient Briton, Scoto-Celt, and Hiberno-Saxon strains, is hardly possible except in a colony. Hence Australia may eventually produce a type of the highest physical and mental vigour possible to the race. It has been conceded that borderers—presumably mixed—have always excelled in stature and mental calibre the pure races. As much may be asserted in days to come of Australians. As it is, instances are not wanting of a type of manhood combining harmoniously those qualities of which English, Irish, and Scotch have from time immemorial been accustomed to boast.
I conclude this outline of a deeply-important question by recording my deliberate conviction, that in the essentials of character, the Southern British race truly resembles and in
