SPEAKING of the wasteful methods of Nature and the lack of an apparent purpose in creation, the late Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, the famous German scientist, a specialist in the field of physiological optics, is said to have made the remark that if any instrument-maker should ever have dared to favor him with a contraption quite as clumsy as the human eye, he would have denounced the man as an incompetent bungler who did not know his business.

I am glad Helmholtz did not extend his investigations beyond the realm of physiology and electricity for I would hate to repeat what he would have said about the way the deity handled the geographical arrangement of our planet.

Take a country like Greenland. There it lies, almost buried beneath thousands of feet of show and ice.If those 47,000 square miles could be moved to the middle of the ocean, they might support a population of millions of people.Now they offer a scant living to a few thousand ice-bears and a handful of half-starved Eskimos.But as a sublime example of bad executive management, I offer you Australia.For Australia, although of ficially registered as a continent, is just about exactly everything a well-regulated continent should not be.

In the first place, its location is so unfortunate that although the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Dutch had suspected its existence for over a hundred years and had done their best to discover it, the whole of that enormous territory of almost 3,000,000 square miles(as large, therefore, as the United States)was not actually seen by the eyes of a white man until the year 1642,to Abel Tasman, flying the flag of the Dutch East India Company, circumnavigaed the country and took possession of it in the name of the United Netherlands.

But this visit of state was perfectly useless from a practical point of view. The Dutch were not interested in this wilderness and allowed their title to lapse.When James Cook was sent to the Pacific to observe the transit of the planet Venus in the year 1769(a century and a quarter therefore after Tasman's voyage)the map-makers of Amsterdam and London were still quite uncertain where exactly they must place this Terra Australis Incognita in the midst of the vast expanse of water that went by the name of the Great Peaceful Ocean.

Not only did Australia suffer from a bad location, but in the second place it had a very unfortunate climate. The climate is fairly good along the east coast and along the eastern part of the southern coast where Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the four big cities, are located.But the northern coast is uncomfortably wet and the western coast is uncomfortably dry, which means that the most inhabitable part is also the furthest removed from the great trade-routes which connect Asia with Africa and Europe.

In the third place, the whole of the interior is a desert without any rain and its subterranean water supply is so badly located that systematic irrigation will always be extremely difficult.

In the fourth place, the highest parts are practically everywhere along the outer edges of the continent. The interior therefore resembles a hollow bowl, and, since water does not flow up hill, it has no rivers worthy of that name.The Darling River, the largest of all Australian rivers(1160 miles long)takes its origin among the mountains of Queensland, not so many miles away from the Coral Sea, a part of the Pacific Ocean.But instead of running eastward into the Pacific, it flows westward to lose itself in Encounter Bay, and for the greater part of the year(remember that it is winter in the southern hemisphere when it is summer in the northern, and vice versa)it consists mainly of a series of pools and is of no earthly use to anybody.

In the fifth place, there were no natives who could be trained to do the white man's chores. The unfortunate Australians, about whose origin we are still very much in the dark, might just as well have lived on another planet, as far as their relations with the rest of mankind were concerned.Left entirely to their own devices, they never rose very high beyond the status of some of our more primitive animals.For example, they never learned how to build houses nor how to raise grain nor how to use a spear or an arrow or an axe.They knew how to handle the boomerang, as indeed a great many other people all over the world had done at one time or another.But whereas the others had eventually graduated from that very clumsy weapon to the sword and the spear and the bow, the Australians had remained exactly where they had been shortly after their ancestors had learned to walk on their hind legs without the support of their arms.The most generous way of classifying them would probably be to say that they resembled“the hunting type”of the earliest period of the Stone Age.And even then we are rather hard on the typical stone-age man who was as a rule a much better artist than any aboriginal Australian has ever been.

And finally, this poor continent had apparently been told to shift for itself long before the earth had been covered by those plants and shrubs which have contributed so much to our own comfort and happiness. It had developed a specific dry-climate flora of its own which is un doubtedly of profound interest to our professional botanists but which offers the white settler, intent upon raising a profitable crop of something or other(anything at all as long as it pays him for his trouble),only very slight prospects for a profitable future.Kangaroo grass and salt bush make fairly good food for sheep, but the common prickly spinifex is too much even for the hard-palated camel.And one cannot very well grow rich raising eucalyptus trees, although some of them will grow as high as 400 feet, the only rivals of our own sequoias in California.

As for the farmers who hastened to this new promised land in 1868 when it definitely ceased to be a penal colony they found themselves faced by a collection of living fossils which absolutely refused to let themselves be domesticated. Once more it was the isolated position of Australia which had allowed all these curious prehistoric creatures to continue their existence long after they had been exterminated in every other part of the world.The complete absence of all the larger and more intelligent mammals of Asia and Africa and Europe had not forced these Australian quadrupeds to improve their intellectual capacities or die out.From sheer lack of competition they had always remained as they had been on the day they were born.

We are all of us familiar with the strange animal called the kangaroo. The kangaroo belongs to the family of the marsupials.Marsupials are animals which have a pouch in which they carry their young who are born imperfect and who then grow to perfection inside this pouch.During the tertiary period, the whole earth was inhabited by marsupials.Today there remains only one variety of marsupial in America, the opossum, but Australia has quite large number of them.

Another prehistoric remnant are the so-called Monotremata, the lowest sub-class of the mammals, creatures which have but a single outlet for all the excretory channels of the body. The best-known among these is the grotesque ornithorhynchus paradoxus or water-mole, a brownish creature some twenty inches long, with short fur and the bill of a duck(which in the young has even got teeth)and web-feet with long nails and a poisonous horny spur on the heels of the males—a walking museum of everything that Nature has ever invented or discarded during the millions of years of her evolutions forward and backward.

As for the rest of the Australian fauna, it contains a most formidable museum of animal curiosities:birds with feathers that are formed like hair;birds that can only walk and are unable to fly;birds that laugh like jackals;cuckoo birds which look like pheasants and pigeons as large as chickens;rats with web-feet and rats with tails that allow them to climb trees;lizards able to walk on two legs;fishes with gills and lungs which date back to the days of the ichthyosaurus and which are really a mixture of fish and amphibian;wild dogs that resemble both a jackal and a wolf and that may be the descendants of pariah dog imported into Australia by some of the earliest immigrants from the Asiatic mainland;and a whole menagerie of other monstrosities.

But that is not all. Australia also has an assortment of insects of its own and they are more to be feared than tigers and snakes.There are the jumping ants, for Australia is El Dorado of the jumpers.Mammals, birds, insects, they all of them jump in preference to flying or running.There are ants that live in skyscrapers of their own making.There are ants that will eat their way through anything short of a cast-iron door, for they are able to cover ordinary tin and lead boxes with a particular acid which causes the metal to oxidize and allows the ants to dig a tunnel through which they can enter into the interior and then destroy the contents at their own leisure.

There are the flies which hatch their eggs in the skins of sheep and cows, and mosquitoes which make the swampy regions of southern Australia absolutely uninhabitable, and the grasshoppers, able to destroy the labor of years in as many minutes, and the ticks which attach themselves to the flocks and live on their blood, and the cockatoos who look so pretty and so harmless but are able to do terrific damage when operating en masse, as they are apt to do in that part of the world.

But the worst of all these manifold local plagues is not of Australian origin at all but an import from Europe. I refer to Brer Rabbit, a harmless enough creature in his usual haunts, but a terrific nuisance among the sandy wastes of a continent where the creatures can breed ad libitum.The first rabbits were introduced from England in the year 1862 for the purpose of a little sport.The colonists were bored.Hunting rabbits would be a pleasant diversion to break the monotony of life in the bush.A few of these rabbits escaped and they set up house-keeping in the well-known rabbit fashion.Astronomers, accustomed to deal with large figures, have tried to compute the number of rabbits that must be at large at the present moment in Australia.They have come to the conclusion that there must be almost 4,000,000,000 of them.As forty rabbits eat as much as one single sheep, that represents a herd of 100,000,000 sheep.Draw your own conclusions.Entire regions have been devastated by these rodents.Western Australia was so badly eaten by the hungry conies that an effort was made to protect it from further invasions by means of a gigantic fence of chicken-wire, a sort of Chinese rabbit-wall, over three feet high and three feet below the ground, to prevent the vermin from digging holes underneath.But, driven by necessity they soon learned to climb these fences and the plague continued unabated.Poison was then tried, but also in vain.Wild animals which regulate the rabbit supply in the rest of the world were not to be found in Australia, or refused to adapt themselves to this strange land and died as soon as they were imported.And in spite of all the white man has done, the rabbits continue to multiply as merrily as the sparrow, another European importation which is now the dread of all Australian garden lovers, and as rapidly as the prickly-pear which has taken to the arid Australian soil as a seal takes to water.

Nevertheless, and in spite of these terrific handicaps, the immigrants have succeeded in making Australia the most important wool-growing country of the world. Today Australia, with almost 80,000,000 sheep, looks after one-quarter of all the wool we wear, and wool accounts for fully two-fifths of the country's exports.

As the Australian mainland is much older than Europe, it is self-evident that it must contain a great variety of minerals. The gold rush of the early fifties drew attention to the Australian gold fields.Since then, lead, copper, tin, iron and coal have also been located, but oil has not yet been found.Diamonds occur, but they are rare.Semi-precious stones, on the other hand, such as opals and sapphires, occur in large quantities.Lack of capital and bad means of transportation have prevented a thorough exploitation of these treasures but that will come in time when Australia shall at last have recovered from years of financial mismanagement and shall once more be counted among the solvent nations.

Meanwhile Australia enjoys the distinction of having been, next to Africa, the most difficult continent to explore. By the beginning of the nineteenth century her three main divisions were fairly well understood.There was the table-land of the west, which had an average altitude of 2000 feet, although in some spots it went as high as 3000 feet.This table-land was also the gold land, but it had no harbors and only one city of any importance, called Perth.Then there were the eastern highlands, very ancient mountain-ranges which rain and wind had gradually worn away until the highest top, Mount Kosciusco, was only 7000 feet above sea-level.This was the part of the continent with good harbors, which therefore attracted the first colonists.

Between these two elevated plateaus lay a wide plain which never rose above 600 feet and which in the region of Lake Eyre actually sank below sea-level. This plain was cut into halves by two mountain-ranges, the Flinders range in the west and the Grey range in the east which connected in the north with the mountains of Queensland.

As for the political development of the country, it has been peaceful but only fairly successful. The first immigrants were people, who according to the laws of England of the latter half of the eighteenth century, were considered“criminals”,but who usually were guilty of no worse crime than that poverty or misery which had driven them to commit some petty offence like the theft of a loaf of bread or a few apples.The first penal settlement was in Botany Bay, so called because Captain Cook, who discovered it, arrived there just when all the little flowers were in bloom.The colony itself was called New South Wales and Sydney was the capital.The island of Tasmania, then part of New South Wales, was converted into a penal station in 1803,and the convicts were gathered together in the neighborhood of the present city of Hobart.In 1825 the city of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, was founded.During the thirties a settlement at the head of the bay, called Port Phillip, was named after Lord Melbourne and it became the capital of the province of Victoria.Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, dates back to the same period, but Perth, the capital of West Australia, remained an insignificant village until the days of the great gold rush of the early fifties.As for the northern territory, administered by the Commonwealth very much as our own territories used to be administered by Washington, although it has an area of half a million square miles, it has only 5000 inhabitants of whom less than 2000 live in Port Darwin on the Timor Sea, one of the finest natural harbors in the world but without a vestige of trade.

In the year 1901 these six states, with 6,000,000 inhabitants of which three-quarters lived in the east, formed the Commonwealth of Australia and seven years later they decided to build themselves a new capital called Canberra, situated 150 miles south-west of Sydney and not far away from Mount Kosciusco, the highest mountain of all Australia.

In the year 1927 the Dominion took possession of its new headquarters. But the parliament of the new Commonwealth will have to do some very deep thinking ere it can pull the nation out of its present difficulties.In the first place, the Labor Union Government, which had been in control ever since the Great War, has been so needlessly costly that the Commonwealth is no longer able to get any credit from the money-lenders of Europe.It is doubtful whether the new government that has recently succeeded the Labor Party will be able to overcome this financial handicap without making some very serious concessions.In the second place, Australia suffers from a most dreadful under-population.Tasmania and New South Wales have eight people to the square mile.Victoria has twenty.But Queensland and South Australia have only one and West Australia only one half per square mile.And even these have been so thoroughly steeped in labor union lore that they are among the world's most incompetent and indifferent workmen and cannot live without a great many public holidays, devoted to sport and horse-racing.

Well then, who is to do the work that is necessary to keep a nation going?

Italians are not wanted, although they would be perfectly willing to come. But the English middleclass element which is predominant in the political life of the Commonwealth has coined the phrase,“Australia for the Australians”,which means the exclusion of everything that is not strictly white and of English middle-class origin.The hardworking Italian is neither, and he is therefore discouraged from crossing the Torres Strait.The Japanese and the Chinese, being yellow of color, are out of the question.The Polynesians and the Malays and the Javanese are of a chocolaty hue and therefore anathema.I repeat the question-who is to do the work?And I add that I do not know the answer.But 3,000,000 square miles of land lie practically uninhabited, and other parts of the world are hopelessly overpopulated.This will provide the usual solution.