An ingenious but sarcastic Yankee, when asked what he thought of Western Australia, declared that it was the best country he had ever seen to run through an hour-glass. He meant to insinuate that the parts of the colony which he had visited were somewhat sandy. It is sandy. The country round Perth is very sandy. From Freemantle, the seaport, the road up to Perth, the capital, lies through sand. From Albany, the seaport at which the mail steamers stop, the distance to Perth is about 260 miles, and the traveller encounters a good deal of sand on the way. The clever Yankee who thought of the hour-glass probably did not go beyond Perth. There is much soil in Western Australia which is not sandy,--which is as good, perhaps, as any land in the Australian colonies;--but it lies in patches, sometimes far distant from each other; and there is very much desert or useless country between. In this is, probably, to be found the chief reason why Western Australia has not progressed as have the other colonies. The distances from settlement to settlement have been so great as to make it almost impossible for settlers to dispose of their produce. This has been the first great difficulty with which Western Australia has had to contend; and to this have been superadded others: the absence of gold,--an evil not so much in itself as in the difference created by the presence of gold in the other colonies, whereby the early settlers in Western Australia were induced to rush away to Adelaide and Melbourne; its remoteness from the populous parts of the Australian continent; the fact that it is not the way from any place to any other place; the denseness and endlessness of its forests; its poisonous shrub, which in many places makes the pasturing of sheep impossible; and the ferocity of the aboriginal tribes when they first encountered their white invaders. These causes have made the progress of Western Australia slow, and have caused the colony to be placed in a category very different from that in which the other colonies are reckoned, and to be looked at from an exceptional point of view.