There is now a national park at William’s Promontory, which is the most southern point of Victoria—indeed, of the whole of Australia—where it is hoped that many of the rapidly-decreasing and unique wild animals of the continent may be induced to breed and otherwise make themselves at home, though, oddly enough, the kangaroos—true kangaroos, for there are any number of wallabies—have been found the most difficult to procure of all the animals. Still, there are koalas, and wombats, bower-birds, lyre-birds, and many others—though whether there is or is not a platypus I am unable to say; but the scarcity of kangaroos is appalling to all lovers of Nature-life, who remember how Flinders, in his book, tells of the huge flocks of those animals abounding along the shores of the new colony, so numerous and so tame that they could easily be killed with clubs or the butt-end of the men’s guns. Every year, however, the number of truly wild animals of Australia is—sad to say—lessening as surely as are the aborigines, though, perhaps, more slowly. In a book about Victoria, written by the old colonist, modestly hiding his identity under the pseudonym of “A Pioneer,” we are told of the immense numbers of the kangaroos, which in the old days were a source of serious worry and loss to the squatter, who used to gather together parties of his neighbours—anyone within a hundred miles coming under that heading—and, forming a cordon, drive them into some enclosed place and then shoot them. The scene is described in stilted Early Victorian phraseology, but yet brings to our mind the most vivid picture of the intense excitement of such a drive. On one station of 100,000 acres some 5,000 kangaroos were killed by driving them into a specially prepared cul-de-sac, ending with a great pit at the far end of a blind fence, as many as 500 a day having been destroyed, while as the animals began to realize that some awful danger was overtaking those in front of them, their efforts to escape, says “A Pioneer,” both by creeping under the horses and leaping over them, became little short of frantic. When “A Pioneer” first landed in Melbourne in 1840, there was, where Port Melbourne now stands, one “mean, solitary cottage on the beach, boasting the name of Liardet’s Hotel”—rather an ominous combination of syllables, one might imagine. But the owner of it, Captain Liardet, seems to have been a very good fellow, and, meeting the newcomer at the ship, rowed him up the river, thick with wild duck and black swan, to the city of tents and shanties, where the entire space now occupied by Government buildings was one dense scrub. Later on he writes of his experiences at the time of the gold rush, when he and his partner drove a mob of cattle to Melbourne, and found there neither butchers, slaughterers, nor buyers.