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<p>[Page 54]</p><p>and locusts arriving in such multitudes as to stop a train, but that ants should achieve similar feats, as was reported in the papers recently, is new to me. Rabbits and foxes, which didn’t even exist in Australia before the arrival of the Europeans, have bred so copiously that the former are now considered a plague. Hundreds of thousands are being culled each year by trappers and sent to Europe on refrigerated steamships; hundreds of thousands are being poisoned each year, and yet their numbers have grown so strongly that government had to take extraordinary measures. In New South Wales and in Victoria there are too many [rabbits] for the measures to have any real effect, but in South Australia and Western Australia there is still hope and so the government had an iron-mesh rabbit fence erected that runs the length of the border between the two states, from south to north, that is, from sea to sea, and reaches so deep into the ground as to make it impossible for the rabbits to advance into the untouched states. But still the beasts managed to get through in small numbers, and so</p>