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52 JAMES BACKHOUSE.
religious body to which he belonged, often travelling irom home fo
religions work, at first principally through the thinly-po[)ulated agri-
cultural parts of Yorkshire and the neighbouring counties. In 1831,
he undertook an extensive missionary tour, in company with a com-
panion, which occupied him altogether more than ten years. First
they visited Australia, where they remained seven years. The scope
of their journey, as he explains in his published account of it, was pri-
marily to preach everywhere where there vvas an opportunity amongst
the colonists aiul convicts ;
to visit the penal settlements, gaols, schools,
and other public institutions, to see in what state tliey were, and what
improvements they needed, to do all that lay in their power to ad-
vocate a humane treatment of the residue of the aborigines, and to
promote the spread of teetotalism. The greater part of the seven
years they spent in Tasmania and New South Wales, and then they
visited Western Australia and Mauri titis, and sailed for the Cape Colony,
where they remained for three years, in the course of which they visited
all the towns, and the villages and missionary stations in the interior,
as far as Naraaqua Land and the Orange Kiver, travelling upwards of
six thousand miles in wagons and on horseback. It would be alto-
gether beyond our scope here to enter en any details of the way in
which the travellers fulfilled the objects of their mission. Three large
octavo volumes, amounting in aggregate to not less than two thousand
pages, contain a complete account of what they saw and did, and what
they attempted to do, — one devoted to Australia, the other to the Cape
Colony, and tiie third to a biography of his companion in travel, which
Mr. Backhouse wrote after the death of the latter, not many years
ago. Suffice it to say, that with regard to penal discipline they gave
their warm adhesion to the plans for its amelioration with which the
names of Captain Maconochie and Sir Jolin Franklin (who was then
governor of Van Diemen's Land) are connected, and that a temperance
society in Tasmania and a school for poor children, which they origi-
nated in Cape Town, stilly after the lapse of nearly thirty years, remain
in active operation, the latter supported by funds sent out annually
from England. Of what ]Mr. Backhouse did for botany during his
expedition, we cannot give a better idea than by a quotation from the
introductory essay to Dr. Hooker's ' Flora Tasmanica,' and may adduce
also the testimony of the gentleman to whose labours in the field that
magnificent work was more than to those of any one else indebted.