part of which is a frightful wilderness, and amidst difficulties and risks of both life and fortune, of which the European can have no conception, fill the mind of the intelligent observer with hope and expectation. Throughout the north and north-west, rich lodes of almost every metal abound: lodes as yet virgin to the pick, and teeming with wealth in some of its many mineral forms. If we turn to the low grade reefs of the Murchison we find there such a number and variety of them, and of such gigantic size, that we are filled with amazement, and it needs no prophetic instinct to foresee that here alone is a country which, when once the initial difficulties are overcome, and the numerous errors of management corrected, bids fair to become a second Transvaal; while the rich lodes of the south have certainly no parallel in either contemporary or ancient history. There has never before been so vast an auriferous territory explored and thrown open to the prospector and exploiter; nor ever one which has given better returns for the amount of effort and money actually expended. Such a country must have a great, a magnificent future. Under wise laws and good government, combined with the judicious expenditure of capital, tens of thousands of acres will yet be reclaimed from the deserts; the pot holes of to-day will be the bonanza, fortune-creating mines of the morrow, and many a solitude in the huge wilderness will yet re-echo to the clamour and hum of a busy city. Some day, when wiser counsels prevail, a great trunk railway will traverse the fields from south to north, connecting Esperance with the Murchison and far Pilbarra, and all along that route, which will travel through 1,400 miles of auriferous lands. There will be towns and villages, and the roar of stumpers will resound at every halting place. By the opening up of the goldfields of Western Australia a new and, wealthy province has been added to the Empire. The mythical "Provincia Aurifera" of Peter Plancips, the Dutch geographer, of 1594, became the reality with Bayley's discovery in 1892. To-day, to-morrow, and henceforward Western Australia is not the forgotten, the despised, and the rejected amidst the colonies of Australasia, but the one most likely to take the leading place in material wealth and prosperity. No longer the land of sand and sorrow, Western Australia has become an auriferous empire, which the British peoples may well be proud to possess for a heritage.
