There are not a few in the colonies who declare that South Australia, as a name for the colony which uses it, is a misnomer. Nearly the whole of Victoria is south of nearly the whole of South Australia. Adelaide is considerably to the north of Melbourne, and but very little to the south of Sydney. Consequently those foolish English people at home are actually making the stupidest mistakes! Letters have been addressed to Melbourne, New South Wales, South Australia. The story is very current, and is often told to show the want of geographical education under which the old country suffers. I have not, however, been able to trace the address to later years, and at any time between 1837 and 1851 the details as given by the letter-writer were only too correct. Melbourne did belong to New South Wales, and certainly was in the most southern district of Australia. But if the name South Australia was bad, or falsely describing the colony, when first given, it is infinitely worse now. Then the proposed confines of the young settlement lay around Spencer Gulf, and Gulf St. Vincent, and Encounter Bay, which armlets of the sea break up into the land from the eastern extremity of the Great Australian Bight,--as the curve in the sea line of the southern coast of the continent is called. The new colonists had settled themselves, or, when the name was chosen, were proposing to settle themselves, at the centre of the south coast, and the name was fair enough. But since those days South Australia has extended herself northwards till she has made good her claim up to a line far north of that which divides Queensland from New South Wales, and now she is supposed to run right through the continent up to the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Indian Ocean, so that she thoroughly divides the vast desert tracts of Western Australia from the three eastern colonies, Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. As far as area is concerned, she is at present as much northern as southern. In some of our maps the northern half of these territories is separated by a line from the southern, as though it were a separate colony;--but it has had no name of its own yet given to it; its lands are at the disposition of the government of South Australia; its very few inhabitants are subject to South Australian laws; and it is in fact a part of South Australia. It contains over 500,000 square miles; but, with the exception of one or two very small settlements on the coast, it has no white population. The aborigines who wander through it have been little disturbed, and nothing was known of it till the great enterprise of running a telegraph wire through it from south to north had been conceived and commenced. Now the northern territory has come into fashion, men talk about it in the colonies, and it is becoming necessary that even here in England the fact should be recognised that there is such a land, which will probably before long demand to be instituted as a separate colony.