AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS--TASMAN AND COOK If one looks at the west coast of Australia one is struck by the large number of Dutch names which are jotted down the coast.

There is Hoog Island, Diemen's Bay, Houtman's Abrolhos, De Wit land, and the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides Dirk Hartog's Island and Cape Leeuwin.

To the extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria, and to the extreme south the island which used to be called Van Diemen's Land.

It is not altogether to be wondered at that almost to the middle of this century the land we now call Australia was tolerably well known as New Holland.

If the Dutch had struck the more fertile eastern shores of the Australian continent, it might have been called with reason New Holland to the present day; but there is scarcely any long coast-line of the world so inhospitable and so little promising as that of Western Australia, and one can easily understand how the Dutch, though they explored it, did not care to take possession of it.
[Illustration: TERRES AUSTRALES.