The tropical climate of the northern coast lands was then supposed to be deadly to members of the white races; the interior was declared to be almost entirely devoid of surface water--for the greater part of the year a fiery furnace, and at intervals of capricious periodicity ravaged by destructive floods. It was assumed to be a country where the white man would wither and the coloured man thrive--a land wholly unfit for the home of civilised peoples, and only adapted to the wants of the degraded aboriginal native. It was ignorantly affirmed that the sheep stations intended to be formed in the far western country must be failures, and English experts held that under the tropical sun the sheep, if it could live in Queensland at all, would soon carry hair instead of wool. Even in Southern Queensland the agricultural possibilities of the land were sadly unappreciated. True, in the population centres there were loud preachers of the gospel of reclamation of the wilderness so that it might bud and blossom as the rose; but their homilies for the most part fell upon deaf ears--the seasoned bushman, like the great squatter, tenaciously held that even the Darling Downs would not grow a cabbage. So backward was the farming industry that in 1860 the total area under cultivation was 3,353 acres in a country of greater extent than France and Germany combined. Of this trifling cultivated area only 196 acres were under wheat, and not an acre under sugar-cane. True, there were nearly three and a-half million sheep, half-a-million cattle, and 24,000 horses finding subsistence on the limitless but ill-watered natural pastures. But at that time the annual clip from the sheep, though wool was the chief export of the colony, totalled only 5,000,000 lb., or equal to about 11/2 lb. to each fleece. Mining, except for coal, of which 12,327 tons was raised in 1860, was almost non-existent, although 2,738 fine ounces of gold are shown by the statistics to have been won during the year. [Illustration: TREASURY BUILDINGS, BRISBANE]