It is on the fertile scrub land that the most successful agriculture is carried on. These scrubs are generally found on the banks of rivers, although in certain localities broad areas, containing hundreds of square miles, are clothed with scrub. The soil is a deep alluvial deposit; and the close-growing trees on it spring straight and tall in the struggle to reach the upper atmosphere and light, for the leafy roof allows no sun to penetrate to the damp ground, soft with mouldering leaves, but makes a cool green gloom even on the most fiery summer day. There is something very solemn in the quietude of a scrub untouched by the axe of the lumberer or settler. There is no undergrowth, properly speaking, though delicate little ferns and fairy-like mosses nestle close to the feet of the trees. But there is a wealth of parasitical life. Giant lianas twine from tree to tree, hanging in great loops and folds and contortions, suggesting the idea of huge vegetable monsters writhing in agony. Much more graceful are the lovely shy orchids hiding in crannies, and the bolder ferns, springing from great root-masses attached to the stems of the trees, the graceful shape and curve of the leaves, and their pure pale-green colour, undisturbed and undimmed by wind or sun. Among the wilderness of trees may be noticed the victims of the treacherous fig, the dead trunk of the original tree still visible, but enveloped in the interlacing stem of the robber, which has seized it in its cruel embrace, sucked life and marrow out of it, and reared triumphantly its crown of glossy green leaves far above in the bright sunlight. On all these beautiful or strange or weird objects one gazes in a stillness which seems to be intensified by the continuous murmur of the breeze in the leafy roof--a quiet so great that one is almost startled by the timid thud of the tiny scrub marsupial, which, after a gaze of fascinated terror at the intruder, hurries away, or by the clatter of a scrub pigeon or turkey far up in the overarching foliage, or the strange snoring call of the Australian sloth, or native bear. In the tropical scrub the lianas, the creeping canes and creepers of every description, bind the trees into compact masses of vegetation; and it is a vegetation which, if one may be allowed the term, is of a fiercer type than in the south. Every creeper seems to be armed with thorns, to tear the clothes and lacerate the flesh of the rash intruder, and poisonous and stinging plants abound. Chief among these must be placed the nettle-tree, a shrub with broad green, soft-looking leaves, covered with a down that carries torture in every tiny fibre. Even horses brushed by these treacherous leaves go mad with pain. But in the north, as in the south, the timber-getter rifles the scrub of its treasures of timber, and the sugar planter clears all before him, and skims with his cane-crops the incalculable store of fertility accumulated in the soil.