The coast country, meaning the land watered by the rivers first enumerated, has the advantage over the tableland in the matter of rainfall, and the rivers therefore possess more of the characteristics of running streams, than the chains of isolated ponds that are known as rivers in the inland slope. The climatic influence is especially noticeable in the indigenous grasses and herbage of the two regions. Mr. George Ranken, in one of his essays on Australian subjects ["The Squatting System of Australia," by "Capricornus."] draws an excellent picture of the reclamation and transformation of the forest primeval. "The first comers in 1788, found before them, as their ships came to anchor, sandstone bluffs covered with scraggy trees and heath-like plants, with a bright blue sky above, and an elastic, buoyant atmosphere around. As they went inland, they found an endless open forest, the ground being clothed with a light, tufty grass, but it was the starved outline of European woodland scenery, for the trees rose bare and branchless from a thirsty soil, and the grass covered only half, the surface of the earth. Except the grass, and that was thin enough, though it grew everywhere, the country seemed poor in products, and looked as if it were involved in a constant struggle between droughts and floods. They would have judged it to be poor in capability also, if, on further experience, a vitality had not appeared which seemed to electrify the soil on the touch of colonisation. Imported animals, trees, and plants lived and flourished among the dingy forests, which barely yielded food enough for a few wandering savages. "The farther they went, the greater contrast appeared, more drought and better country; and in later times, as the last of enigmas, a change of vegetation and climate seemed to follow the settler with his flocks and herds. After a few years' feeding with stock, water has been found permanently standing in country where it never stood before, and sometimes the tufty herbage has changed into a sward. The flats that used in one season to show a succession of swamps, and in another a surface of bare dusty soil, rifted with yawning cracks, has often become good level turf, intersected with runnels cut by the hoofs of the sheep and cattle."