The skull of the Australian black is tolerably regular, the forehead broad and high, the bridge of the nose pretty high, the eyes dark, brilliant, and sunken; the nose and cheek-bones well marked. The mouth generally is broad, the upper lip overhanging the under, and the upper teeth also project beyond the under. The face, like the entire body, is hairy in an unusual degree; the hair of the head is black, thin, often very fine in texture, and slightly crisped without being woolly. The skin is usually dark or dirty brown, or brownish black. The custom of marking the outer arm from the shoulders downwards with three or four marks, from 1 to 1-1/2 inch long, and rather thick in the cicatrix, and continuing over the back with similar incisions, is pretty universal, and seems to be considered as a personal decoration. The elder people have the nasal cartilage bored through, and wear in the orifice kangaroo bones, or other bones, or even pieces of wood as amulets. We did not however remark this among the younger generation; this hideous custom seems to have died out, apparently on account of its discomfort. The stay of the _Novara_ in Australia was, as already remarked, so brief, that it did not admit of the scientific staff making more distant tours to the great cattle "stations," or gold districts. At the same time it appears to us important to make some few observations on these two products, to which Australia is indebted for her present prosperity, and the former of which is fraught with even more of its future destiny than the latter. At the commencement of the present century England used to procure all her wool from Spain, and somewhat later from Germany[21] and Hungary. Since that period the production of wool in the Cape, the East Indies, and Australia, has so enormously increased, that Great Britain is enabled to get from her colonies the entire consumption she requires for her woollen manufactures, averaging from 60 to 70,000,000 lbs., thus utilizing the agricultural energies of her emigrating children for the behoof of the mother country and her industrial classes. New South Wales produces at present (1858) above 17,000,000 lbs. of wool, the whole of Australia about 50,000,000. The number of sheep has increased from 29, imported by the first colonists in 1778,[22] to 8,139,160 in New South Wales alone, the total for all Australia being about 15,000,000. Some proprietors have upwards of 100,000 sheep, which they divide into flocks of from 2000 to 3000, which are in charge each of its respective shepherd, who keeps them in their own special "runs."