A common sight in the well-watered regions is the Australian "tulip" (nearly everything in Australia is mis-named)--the great red Waratah flower, really a kind of _Protea_. To this same order (_Proteaceæ_), which is so well represented in Australia and South Africa, belong the beautiful-foliaged _Grevillea_ trees and the celebrated _Banksia_, a shrub named after Sir Joseph Banks, and found in Australia and New Guinea. In the marshes and creeks of Queensland there are superb water lilies with leaves 18 inches in diameter. The gouty Baobab trees of the desert have been already mentioned. [7] See p. 241. Beautiful scenery is only to be met with in Australia in the mountain ranges of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, and in the vicinity of Perth (south-west Australia). Here there are glades with superb tree-ferns, but the mountain peaks above the tree zone are bare and desolate. A large proportion of the interior is a dismal flat of scrub and stones, its monotony only broken by 6- to 20-feet-high mounds of the Termites or white ants. A good deal of the north coast is obstructed by forests of mangroves--a dismal-looking tree with its dull-green, leathery foliage, grey-white stems and pendent air-roots. An interesting feature, however, in Australian scenery is the Great Barrier Reef. This is the remains of a former north-eastward extension of Australia--an immense coral reef stretching out for several hundred miles from the coast of Queensland in the direction of New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. This reef of visible and sunken rocks acted as a great barrier in the past, and prevented timid navigators from finding the north-east coast of Australia and establishing its separation from New Guinea. But the reef is of importance to commerce, for it maintains enormous quantities of the Trepang or Sea-slug, a creature which makes delicious soup and is passionately liked by the Chinese. [It is not really a slug but a relation of the star-fish, and is called scientifically a Holothurian.] The Great Barrier Reef is famous for the variety and almost incredible beauty of its corals and of the painted and decorated fish, anemones, and crabs of these shallow waters. It is, in fact, a region of such wonderful and strange beauty that one can only hope it will some day be made a kind of national aquarium by the Commonwealth of Australia, and constantly visited by those who like to gaze on the marvellous animals of a tropical coral sea. The rocky coasts of Australia and Tasmania (besides those of the Philippines and the Pacific Islands) are remarkable for their abundant supplies of oysters, clams, whelks, and other shell-fish, which for ages have been a great food supply to savage man,[8] who had in fact merely to take at low tide what nature offered to him, at very little trouble to himself. Some of the clams (_Tridacna_) are enormous, measuring 3 feet and even 5 feet across the upper shell.