Few diseases can be said to be produced by the climate of Australia: dissipation and numerous vices introduced from home have caused some to prevail extensively in the populous town of Sydney, but in the interior they are comparatively few. A number of persons perish from that fatal disease consumption; but I do not regard it as produced by the climate, as it invariably attacks persons from England, of dissipated habits, or of employments uncongenial to health. The vice of intemperance prevails extensively, and renders the bills of mortality much greater than could be supposed from the population and acknowledged salubrity of the climate. New Zealanders are now employed at Sydney as labourers, and are much esteemed for their steady and sober habits: they are also careful of the money they earn:—as an instance, one of them, who had just returned to Sydney from a whaling voyage, on receiving his wages, placed the amount in the hands of a gentleman, from whom he drew occasionally, about ten shillings at a time, to purchase clothes, or any other necessary article. The Australian ladies may compete for personal beauty and elegance with any European, although satirized as “corn-stalks” from the slenderness of their forms. It is true their reserve is great, but it proceeds from diffidence, for in family intercourse they are both animated and communicative. Their education, from a deficiency of good schools, was formerly much neglected, except they were sent to Europe for that purpose; but now that cause of complaint is removed by the establishment of several respectable seminaries and teachers; so the high degree of natural talent the Australian females really possess may now be improved by proper cultivation. Even among the male Australians there is a taciturnity proceeding from natural diffidence and reserve, not from any want of mental resources: this led one of their more lively countrymen to observe, “that they could do every thing but speak.” It has been said that formerly it was dangerous in England to inform a fellow-traveller of having just arrived from Botany Bay, as he will soon shun your acquaintance; but visitors from that country must, after the following anecdote, stand a worse chance in the celestial empire. A ship arriving at China from Australia, the commander, when asked by the Chinese where the ship came from, jocosely answered, “From New South Wales, where all the English thieves are sent.” The inhabitants of the empire, taking the joke seriously, reported this and every other ship which arrived from that country to the mandarin as “ship from thiefo country: one thiefo captain, three thiefo officers, twenty-five thiefo crew.” And when the Hooghly arrived with the late governor of New South Wales, it was—“One thiefo viceroy of thiefo country, with several thiefo attendants.” The thiefo viceroy’s lady landing at Macao, was not reported to the mandarin.