Australia, besides her tree-like flowers, has trees rich in bright blooms: the “fire-tree” and the “flame-tree” that make a blaze of red and orange upon hill-sides miles away, the crooked “honeysuckle” with its yellow “bottle brushes,” the odd “grass-tree” bearing up a tuft of sharp leaves from which springs several feet of flowery stalk, the “miall-tree” with its streaming foliage and scent of violets, and the other innumerable acacias, here known as “wattles,” that can light up even the gloom of the scrub with their gay blossoms. These growths are apt to run to flowers rather than to fruit, the native berries being sweeter to the eye than to the tooth; and, while the flowers lack perfume, it is the leaves that are often fragrant, sometimes loading the air with an aroma wafted leagues out to sea. Then there are fine timber-trees, magnificent cedars, the umbrageous blackwood, the funereal casuarina or she-oak, whose dark branches droop willow-like over the fitful streams; the jarrah and the karri belonging to the eucalyptus order, the latter voted its most noble form. New Zealand, too, has magnificent and beautiful trees--its kauri, king of conifers, its forests of tree-fern, its jungles of flowering shrubs, its glowing rata parasite, strangling the trunk that nursed it by sucking the sap into its own masses of crimson bloom, like a cuckoo of the vegetable world. But our first Antipodean colonists would exchange a wilderness of such glories for a patch of English turf; and their sons still love to surround themselves with the humble garden flowers and hardy blossoms of “home,” yielding to no land in fresh and tender tints, however it may be surpassed in gorgeous and gigantic growths. Many of our familiar plants, indeed, have been introduced at the Antipodes with sometimes too much success. The branches of apple and pear trees will there break down under their teeming crop; the thistles rashly imported into Australia by some patriotic Scot have thriven to the rank of a nuisance, like the rabbits; the sturdy British gorse and sweet-brier outshoot their native modesty and the design of colonists who thought to make them serve as hedges; and our weeds and hedge plants take so kindly to New Zealand soil as to have overlaid the native flora in some districts, where the coarse indigenous grass soon gives place to succulent meadows spangled with daisies and primroses. Water-cress, transplanted to New Zealand, has grown as troublesome as the American weed in our canals, to the point of causing floods by damming up the streams upon which it takes a new exuberant life.