BALK about the romance of engineering! Here are hundreds of thousands of square miles, formerly the despair and terror of government and farmer alike, magically "struck," as Moses struck the rock, and forthwith turned into smiling fields of grain, and far stretching stock-farms capable of raising rams worth five thousand dollars each!

Truly the "dead heart" of Australia is being slowly quickened into life by the water-wizard's derrick and his boring pipes, that are miles deep. A wonderful victory of mind over matter, such as enables the Commonwealth of Australia to produce fine wool alone worth nearly eighty million dollars a year!

People have wondered why an island continent with nearly three million square miles of territory-nearly two billion acres !-could never muster more people than New York City. A mere

coastal fringe of humanity at that, running inland here and there after gold in a burning wilderness, only made endurable at all by imported camels from India. The pastoralists used to look longingly at vast tracts covered with rich lush grasses six feet high, and clearly possessed of splendid stock-fattening qualities.

Alas, such lands were a delusion and a snare! For a month or two later the fertility vanished as though it had been a desert mirage, and the very kangaroos, wallabys, lizards and birds covered the country with their dead bodies for hundreds of miles. The usual terrible drought had set in, which has ruined. even the most skilful and resourcefu! stock farmers the world ever saw.

Something had to be done, for there are vast areas of the interior wholly without permanent surface waters. Rivers disappear as though by magic, and fail long before they reach the sea. Really great rivers are conspicuous by their total absence, because there are no

mighty central ranges to create them. At times the "water-courses" run roaring as full bankers, but pass away as though the country's face were one enormous sponge.

The Australian pastoralist scoops out dams to hold back what he can—the merest drop in that ocean of rainfall. But it was not until almost the other day that the Government geologists began to won der what Nature herself had done with all this water? Had it, they wondered, percolated into tertiary drifts and cretaceous beds far below, there to be kept safe from evaporationthat all-devouring enemy of the run-holder's dam? It dawned upon Government and people that an illimitable artesian supply might be had from beds extending under an immense area of Central Australia, from the western districts of New South Wales to an unknown limit in arid Western Australia. So far mere theories. And while the geologists were arguing, the practical men were figuring out the rainfall and river flows to calculate how much water was "missing."

the bowels of the earth in New South Wales had been tapped in one hundred and nineteen places, with an aggregate of 216,059 feet of piping, which brought up from the depths more than fifty million gallons of water every twenty-four hours.

A wild enthusiasm seized the Australian pastoralists. No depth or no cost. was too great. The Whitewood bore on the famous Bimmerah sheep station in

SUCCESS IN A BIG AUSTRALIAN BORE.

Billions of gallons were unaccounted for, and so an experimental bore was put down on the Kallara Run in the Colony of New South Wales. When down to about one hundred and fifty feet, the expectant stock raisers were astounded to behold a tremendous gush of water, which with a roar and a hiss shot nearly thirty feet above the surface! It was a momentous event in the history of an entire continent. The Government of the colony took the matter up instantly, and going systematically and scientifically to work, from 1884 onward has been sinking wells with perfectly magical results, as I shall show. In a couple of decades

Queensland was long considered a failure. Yet after $35,000 had been spent in sinking that slender pipe to the amazing depth of 5,045 feet, up gushed a flow of 70,000 gallons a day.

The Dolgelly bore, the deepest in New South Wales, is down to 4,086 feet, with a magnificent yield of 682,000 gallons a day. Even this, however, is nearly trebled by the enormous Milchomi bore, around which a veritable city has sprung up in what was a fearsome desert, only to be crossed by the hardiest pioneers on

camel-back. A bird even could scarcely cross that country, which now waves with a superb wheat crop yielding forty or fifty bushels to the acre!

A "Miracle of Moses" indeed! The quality of water thus brought from the bowels of the earth varies most curiously. Sometimes it is heavily impregnated with soda or other minerals. In many cases it has to be treated even before the stock can take it, or allowed to flow down channels in which its organic contents are precipitated more or less. Again, it may be delicious potable water.

Strangest of all, as in the case of the Moree bore in New South Wales, a regular health resort may spring up around the magical tube, with Government baths and a sanatorium for rheumatic and other ailments. Another singular point is the enormous variation in temperature. For this artesian water ranges from icy coldness to far beyond boiling point.

The waters of the Helidon bore are only 60° Fahrenheit, while the "Elderlie No. 2" in Queensland hurls up 1,600,000 gallons of hissing, steaming fluid every day from a depth of 4,523 feet at the astounding temperature of 202° Fahrenheit. More than one well sinker has been scalded to death by these life-giving waters!

Sometimes, too, water at positive boiling point down below issues at a temperature enabling both stock and human beings to drink it with impunity. For the most part, however, these wonderful supplies must be cooled off considerably before they can be drunk by sheep and cattle. For this reason, and also for irrigating and other purposes, the artificial fountains are carried along in channels for forty or fifty miles over the stupendous sheep runs of Queensland and New South Wales.

On the way big lakes are formed, in which luxuriant rushes and sedges flourish, and the kangaroo and waterfowl love to dwell. Pipes and flumes carry supplies both far and near, for the water is also largely used for wool scouring; and in many cases the soda and similar properties held in suspension make it specially fitted for laundry work.

But one of the queerest uses to which ingenious farmers put the natural heat of these artesian fountains is to form in

cubators by means of lined boxes full of eggs. The hot waters just out of the tube flow all round these boxes, and hatch out chickens with wonderful celerity.

I have said that these bores have actually given birth to cities. The most wonderful case in point is that of Barcaldine in Queensland. caldine in Queensland. Here were once glistening salt-flats without a blade of grass. Yet Barcaldine is now a thriving township, because the Government put a bore down these successfully, and the example was followed by private individuals, until the whole district fairly spouted with water. Where wheat had not previously been dreamed of, as much as forty bushels to the acre was secured from rich lands by artesian irrigation; and farmers round about, by alternately irrigating and feeding off, have been able to carry as many as twenty sheep to the

acre.

The pastoralists of Australia now provide a kind of insurance against drought by running irrigation farms from their bores. During the great drought of 1900 Mr. Gatenby, a well-known pastoralist of New South Wales, demonstrated under the severest official inspection that he could grow enough lucerne by bore irri- . gation to feed seventy-five sheep to each acre! And some of these were choice stud flocks-the result of a hundred years of careful breeding and selection, such as have made the Australian merino sheep the finest wool-producing creature in the world.

Government example has led to an enormous increase in private enterprise. In Queensland seventy successful bores were put down by the State and proved so marvelous in results that the pastoralists themselves soon had eight hundred and fifty-eight bores of their own all over the northern State, yielding nearly twelve million gallons a day. And yet this is only a beginning. Mr. J. B. Henderson, the hydraulic Engineer-in-Chief to the Queensland Government, has ascertained that an area nearly twice that of all France is capable of furnishing most generous artesian supplies.

At present well over a thousand bores are spouting in the rich northern province of Australia, their total perpendicular depth being over three hundred miles.

feet long in an ideal gorge position, such as would form a forty mile lake at a cost of about five million dollars. This reservoir would water some five hundred square miles of country outside the usual artesian areas.

As it is, both the fauna and flora of the island continent have adapted themselves wonderfully to their environment. The whole tribe of eucalyptus, as well as the edible scrubs like saltbush, and the Australian grasses, can exist longer without water than any other plants and trees in the world, apart from real desert cacti. Millions of sheep too, in locations vastly

magical spouting bores that have already done so much to change the face of the Continent. Thus the artesian area in New South Wales alone is estimated by the Government geologist, Mr. E. F. Pitman, to consists of 83,000 square miles of storage rocks and deposit.

In Queensland the area is vastly greater at least 445,000 square miles. Mr. W. Gibbons Cox, another authority, estimates that of the annual rainfall in Queensland no less than 7,848,208,217 gallons per diem filters down into the artesian rocks! Even wild and little known South Australia has made a suc