Let Australia be ever so much praised, as being peculiarly adapted for the rearing of sheep, they have there, in common with every kind of animal in every part of the world, a certain liability to disease. With all its boasted steadiness of climate, bad seasons occasionally occur, and lead to sickness among the flocks, and in addition to the usual chances of loss arising from this cause in other countries, there is, in some parts of it, a still more dreaded mischief resulting almost unavoidably from the moral constitution of its society. A convict-servant who has a pique at his master, has it often entirely in his own power to subject the flocks under his charge to some one or other of the serious diseases to which sheep in all countries are peculiarly liable. He may pasture them on an improper spot, and thus induce diarrhoea, or even rot; or he may drive them a few miles from their usual feeding ground, as Dr Lang remarks, when there is nobody present to take cognizance of the fact, and thereby bring them into contact with a scabbed flock. "The chief source of the wealth and prosperity of the colony," says Dr Lang, "is thus, in great measure, at the mercy of the most worthless of men; and so much is this the case, that a highly respectable and intelligent magistrate, observed in the course of a short conversation I had with him before embarking for England, that if there should not be a large annual importation of free emigrant shepherds from the mother country into the colony, the owners of sheep throughout the territory will in future be under the necessity of reducing, or rather of preventing the increase of, their flocks." Thus circumstanced, the Australian settler has surely sufficient reasons for inducing him to make himself familiar with the management and diseases of the animal, on which he is placing his principal dependence.