had neither rose nor distilled water to improve its character, yet the old remedy of sulphate of zinc stood its ground and gave great relief. As a set-off to these attacks of sore and inflamed eyes from which the children especially suffer, they enjoy a complete immunity from measles and hooping-cough, unless, indeed, these should happen to be introduced into the colony through inattention to the laws of quarantine. On more than one occasion that these complaints have been thus imported, they have run rapidly through the colony, but, after a time have again died out, without subsiding into the position that they occupy in England of constant and chronic evils.
Measles were brought into Western Australia, in 1860, from a ship that entered King George's Sound and landed one person ill with the disorder. It spread widely and rapidly, assuming a very virulent character, more especially amongst the natives, of whom so many died that both they and the colonists in alluding to the visitation spoke of it in terms that would have been almost applicable to a time of pestilence.
A lady of our acquaintance told me that on getting up one morning, she found a native woman who had been suffering from measles lying dead outside the house. As my friend had relieved her on the previous day, and had afterwards assisted her in walking to a distance of about a quarter of a mile, she presumed that the poor creature must have found herself abandoned by the other natives, in terror of the infectious nature of the disease, and that she had therefore crawled back alone to the homestead in the night rather than die in solitude. It so happened that the
