A cursory glance down the advertising columns of the Queenslander gives one no mean notion of the colony's capacities. One auctioneer announces for sale three thousand square miles of land, twenty-one thousand head of cattle, and a hundred and twenty-four thousand sheep. A dairy herd of six hundred head is in the market here, and there a stock-owner announces he has seven hundred pure merino rams to dispose of. Sugar-plantations, salt-works, gold mines, are on offer; and—incontrovertible proof of the land's capabilities—nurserymen are ready to supply all comers with seeds or roots 'of all the favourite flowers known in England,' of every kind of grass and grain and vegetable familiar to the British farmer and market-gardener; and keep in stock thoroughly acclimatised apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, quinces, mulberries, walnuts, chestnuts, cobnuts, grapes, figs, limes, lemons, oranges, dates, guavas, and mangoes, in every approved variety.

One correspondent extols the merits of chicory as a profitable thing to grow; another relates his successful attempts at rice-raising; and a third waxes eloquent anent the unique garden of Mr Barnes of Mackay, with its groves and avenues of cocoa-nut trees; its hundreds of fine date-trees; its grapes, oranges, apples, and fruits of all climes and seasons, thriving together; its enormous melons and magnificent pines ripening and rotting around. The owner looks forward to reaping a large profit from his twelve hundred cocoa-nut trees, many of them now thirty feet high, although as yet the return for his ten years' labour and expenditure has been something not worth mentioning.

Then we have an account of 'the acclimated wonders of the vegetable kingdom blooming in this present February 1877, in the government Botanic Gardens of Brisbane;' said gardens being then in the height of their midsummer glory, and a perfect blaze of colour. 'One of the most strikingly handsome as well as curious trees in the gardens is the Kilgeria pinnata, from India. Its branches bear a kind of drooping flexible vine-rope or liana stem, each of which terminates in a large spike of flowers; while at various parts of the said rope pendants, hang huge seed-pods, like in shape unto the weights of an extra large cuckoo-clock.' Several varieties of the mango just now are in fine bearing, and the wine-palm of the West African coast was never more juicy and strawberry-like in flavour. Ferns and palms are magnificent, but after all, the Queenslander finds a native plant excite his admiration most. 'No description can do justice to the exquisite colour of the so-called blue water-lily of this colony. It is not blue, nor white, nor mauve, nor lilac, but has a blended dash of all of them, and is lovelier than any. A Swiss or French dyer who could reproduce it faithfully would make his fortune. It is a colour suggestive of summer afternoons, of lawns, of croquet, of classic villas, swell society, and five o'clock teas in the garden, with greyhounds, spaniels, pretty girls, and rosy children grouped about miscellaneous like.'

Acclimatisation has succeeded too thoroughly in one instance—the rabbit, as we have had occasion to shew in a previous paper, having increased and multiplied until the colonists have reason to wish he had never been induced to settle in the land. One wheat-grower, wroth at having to sit up o' nights with his farm hands, dogs, bullock-bells, and tin cans, in order to scare the little pests back to their burrows, lest, like his neighbours, he should have nothing left to reap, declares either the rabbit or the farmer must go down; there is no longer room for both. Sheep-farmers are in a similar predicament; but their trouble is of native growth; the kangaroo is their bête noire, and they are busy arming against the pouched depredators. Kangaroo battues are the rage. At one held at Warroo, upwards of three thousand five hundred of these animals were disposed of in ten days; making eight thousand of which the run had been cleared in the space of a month—equivalent to saving pasturage for a like number of sheep. Another sheep-owner, after shooting down four thousand kangaroos on a small portion of his run, finds it necessary to call in outside aid, and lay in tons of cartridges for the use of those who respond to the appeal. By reports just to hand (Oct. 1877) we find that the process of kangaroo extermination is still at work.

There are other nuisances it would be well to see to. A woodman at Maryborough lately died of a scorpion sting; and we read of a man being bitten by a black snake while working a short distance from Brisbane. His mates scarified the wound, bound up the arm, and administered a large dose of brandy; put the patient into a cart, and made for a dispensary with all possible speed. Here the wound was scarified again; and a doctor passing by, being called in, cauterised it, and injected ammonia. In a few minutes the man's spasmodic struggles ceased, and he was able to walk to a cab. By the time he reached the hospital all traces of the venom had disappeared, and he seemed only to suffer from the effects of the spirits he had imbibed. The ammonia treatment of snake-bite is not efficacious with the lower animals; at least in a series of experiments upon dogs, not a single canine sufferer recovered. Although Queensland is reputed to be a land of rivers and streams, there are tracts where water is scarce, and those who recklessly go on the tramp, or 'wallaby,' as this kind of vagabondising is called, sometimes experience the horrors of thirst, and actually sink down and die in the wilderness.

To prove the truth of this, and to shew that examples are not wanting of travellers who have died of thirst, a correspondent of the Queenslander tells how, following the tracks of some horses that had strayed from their beat, he came upon a pair of moleskin trousers hanging upon a tree, as if put there for a signal of distress. Looking about, he picked up a torn pocket, containing an illegible cheque and a match-box; and scattered about on the grass saw a blanket, shirt, hat, and water-bag. Searching further, he found the skull and bones of a man who had apparently been dead some two or three weeks; some of the flesh was still on the bones, and the brains were almost intact. Bags of flour, tea, and sugar lay near; a proof that the poor fellow had not died of hunger, but of thirst, the nearest water being twelve miles from the spot where he died his lonely death.

Thomas Stevenson, a lad of seventeen, started one December morning from his brother's station, some fifty miles from Louth, New South Wales, for the post-office at that place, which he reached safely, and left again at daybreak on the Saturday. The following Wednesday his horse arrived home, bearing his rider's coat, scarf, and spurs. His brother started for the bush with some black trackers, who found that the missing lad had been wandering on the Debil-Debil Mountains, but finding it impossible to get his horse down them, had turned back to get round the base of the mountains, but mistaking the road and overtaken by darkness, had camped out and hobbled his horse. After a three days' search the trackers discovered the body of young Stevenson lying between two logs in a lonely part of the bush. The weather had been extremely hot, and it was known he had no water-bag with him; so there was little doubt that he died of thirst. After losing his way and losing hope, he must have taken off his coat, scarf, and spurs, fastened them to a saddle, and turned the horse loose. Then placing the two logs on a track, he had lain down between them with his head resting on a cross-piece at one end, and so waited Death's releasing hand.

If advertising means business, business should be brisk indeed at Darling Downs, since the editor of the Darling Downs Gazette finds it necessary to explain the absence of the customary 'leader' in this wise: 'Owing to a press of advertis—— In fact it is coming to this, that we shall have to throw up the business if people come hustling their advertisements in at the rate they are doing. The general appreciation of the fact that the Gazette is bound to be read by everybody, is becoming overwhelming. We plead guilty to no leader this time; but what were we to do? Only just now a bald-headed man came rushing in—— But stop! let us first explain that we mean no offence to bald-headed men, and they needn't get up in arms. Goodness knows, we were bald-headed enough ourselves once upon a time, and used to be up in arms frequently about that period. Ask our nurse. However, as we were about to say, a bald-headed man came hustling in just as we had commenced our leader, and had got as far as, "When the history of mankind shall have been disinterred from the triturated and inevaporable sediments of its consummated cosmogony"—and while with our pen suspended we were working up the continuation in the same gay and sparkling style, that bald-headed man violently brought us down from the ethereal heights in which we were soaring, and wanted to know whether we could spare space for a column or so of advertisements. He fluttered some dingy papers, each marked five pounds, under our eyes, and we rather liked it. But we conquered our feelings and remarked: "Caitiff! our duty to our readers demands a leading article; hang advertisements! Take your beak from out our heart; take your form from off our door." The wretch winked, and went to the book-keeper, and inveigled him into finding space for that advertisement. Since then, there have been processions of bald and hairy men with insidious manners and fluttering notes, palming off advertisements on us. In short—or if the reader objects to that phrase as inappropriate—at length, we have no leading article, and if the reader could only witness our tears!'

With certain parliamentary proceedings fresh in remembrance, we dare not cast stones at our cousins for not eliminating the rowdy element from their legislatures. That it should be predominant is not surprising, since we are assured, that in view of a coming dissolution, candidates swarm on the ground like frogs in a marsh. Every man who has figured in the insolvent list for the last three years; every boot-black whose stock of materials has given out; wild wood-carters whose only horse and hope is dead; country newspaper reporters down on their luck; country-town bellmen whose vocation has been supplanted; seedy men who cry penny papers in the streets: in short, all Bohemia and its dependencies have taken the field with a view to winning senatorial honours and the three hundred a year going with them. Prominent among these candidates stand Tom M'Inerney, who bases his claims upon the fact that he owns fifteen drays and fourteen children, and is under the impression that S. I. after a man's name denote him to be a civil engineer; and Patrick Tyrrell, who objects to 'circular' education, and who proved himself a real Irishman when asked if he would tax absentees, by replying: 'To be sure I would, if they didn't live in the country.'

However Australian legislators may indulge in libellous personalities, it is pleasant to note that such things are not received into favour by the press; the Queenslander notifying to all concerned, that 'any statement, comment, or criticism of a personal character calculated to provoke ill-feeling in the community from which it may be penned, will not only be rigorously excluded, as hitherto, but any correspondent who may think fit to forward such matter for publication will be immediately requested to discontinue his connection with this journal.' To be perfect, this notification only needs the N.B.—English papers please copy.