Chapter 19

Pity is for the living, Envy is for the dead.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The successor of the sheet-iron hamlet of the mangrove marshes has that
other Australian specialty, the Botanical Gardens. We cannot have these
paradises. The best we could do would be to cover a vast acreage under
glass and apply steam heat. But it would be inadequate, the lacks would
still be so great: the confined sense, the sense of suffocation, the
atmospheric dimness, the sweaty heat--these would all be there, in place
of the Australian openness to the sky, the sunshine and the breeze.
Whatever will grow under glass with us will flourish rampantly out of
doors in Australia.--[The greatest heat in Victoria, that there is an
authoritative record of, was at Sandhurst, in January, 1862. The
thermometer then registered 117 degrees in the shade. In January, 1880,
the heat at Adelaide, South Australia, was 172 degrees in the sun.]

When the white man came the continent was nearly as poor, in variety of
vegetation, as the desert of Sahara; now it has everything that grows on
the earth. In fact, not Australia only, but all Australasia has levied
tribute upon the flora of the rest of the world; and wherever one goes
the results appear, in gardens private and public, in the woodsy walls of
the highways, and in even the forests. If you see a curious or beautiful
tree or bush or flower, and ask about it, the people, answering, usually
name a foreign country as the place of its origin--India, Africa, Japan,
China, England, America, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, Polynesia, and so on.

In the Zoological Gardens of Adelaide I saw the only laughing jackass
that ever showed any disposition to be courteous to me. This one opened
his head wide and laughed like a demon; or like a maniac who was consumed
with humorous scorn over a cheap and degraded pun. It was a very human
laugh. If he had been out of sight I could have believed that the
laughter came from a man. It is an odd-looking bird, with a head and
beak that are much too large for its body. In time man will exterminate
the rest of the wild creatures of Australia, but this one will probably
survive, for man is his friend and lets him alone. Man always has a good
reason for his charities towards wild things, human or animal when he has
any. In this case the bird is spared because he kills snakes. If L. J.
he will not kill all of them.

In that garden I also saw the wild Australian dog--the dingo. He was a
beautiful creature--shapely, graceful, a little wolfish in some of his
aspects, but with a most friendly eye and sociable disposition. The
dingo is not an importation; he was present in great force when the
whites first came to the continent. It may be that he is the oldest dog