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Ellery himself was, after all, the most interesting object in the exhibition. I had some further talk with him, and wished it had been more. He considered that the drag on the earth’s rotation from the tidal wave was far from proved. The fact of the retardation, to begin with, was only conjecture, and if the tidal wave had a retarding action, it might be corrected by other influences unknown to us. I did not venture to propound my own wave theory about it. I asked him about the sub- f: tropical plants lately discovered in coal-measures in latitude i 83° north, and how such plants could have grown when they were half the year in darkness. He seemed to think that there must have been some great difference, greater far than our present knowledge can explain, in the inclination of the earth’s axis. I read, since my return, in a French scientific journal, an assertion that the earth’s axis had at one time been at right angles to the ecliptic, that it had slowly inclined, as we see a spinning top incline, till it had reached an angle of 45 0 of more, and was now half-way back to the perpendicular. This, if true, would explain all the changes of climate which the north part of Europe has evidently passed through from tropical heat to the cold of the glacier epoch. It would explain the plants in those coal-measures. It would explain everything, if true? But is it true? How many times must we outsiders learn up our science, and then unlearn it? Each new generation of philosophers laughs at the conclusions of its predecessors.
CHAPTER VIII.
Expedition into the Interior of the Colony.—Mr. Gillies.—Special Train.—Approaches to Ballarat.—The Rabbit Plague.—A Squatter's Station.—Ercildoun and its Inhabitants.—Ballarat.—Gold-mining.—Australian Farms.—A Cottage Garden.—Lake and Park.—Fish and Flower Culture.—Municipal Hospitality.
Who has not heard of Ballarat, the Eldorado of forty years ago? the diggings where adventurers from all parts of the world flew upon the soil with their picks and shovels, some to light on nuggets which made them into millionaires, some to toil for months unrewarded, yet toiling on as if possessed by a demon! Ballarat was then an arid treeless hollow lying be-