Litchfield enquirer., 1856-06-05

What criminal can that 7" asked the
naturalists, their attention excited by the ex-
pectation Of some novelty in their own region
Of inquiry.
" 1t is the land-shark," said the doctor.
"The land-shark !" said the eager expect
ants, laughing that must be lusus nature
a nondescript, indeed"
No." replied the doctor 1T is a creature
well known, accurately described and classified,
no sport of nature, but the offspring of colonial
life and of the spirit of modern Europe You
have seen the Tasmanian devil-a furious beast,
that will devour it's own species when wounded
The land-shark is even worse devourer of his
kind. You have seen how horses here will paw
up and devour earth on which salt has been
spilled ~
"Yes," said Fritz, mcrrily al know that
to my cost for many time have had to
rise and rush forth in the night and, undressed,
chase away into the bush wretched horses who
were champing, and paving, aud snorting close
to our tent, where our host had poured out the
salt water from picked beef"
"Well," continued the doctor, the land
shark swallows up earth by acres and leagues !;
the wehr-wolf of Scandinavian legends never
had such capacity for the marvellous in de-
glutition. Australia has produced no lion, IT,
ger, grizzly bear, or such ferocious monsters,
but it has produced the laud-shark, and that is
monstrum horrendum worse than all of them
put together. 1t is worse, because it wears
the shape of man and, with a face us inno-
cent as meek, and placid as a manticora or
syren, takes shelter under human laws In
word, land-shark is thing which combines
all the attributes of the incubus, the cannibal,
the vampire, and the choke-damp Where it
lives nobody else can live 1t is the upas tree
become animated and, walking over the south
ern world like new Fraukenstein, producing
stagnation, distortion death-in-life, and dcsola-
ton wherever it arrives. 1t is the regrater and
forstaller of the old world, against whose inhu-
man practice SO many statutes have-been enac-
ted, and thus turned up as the opponent of
Providence in a new sphere. 1t is the meal
worm of the shop, converted by what it feeds
on into the hungry catcrplltr of these lands.
81 have to-day stood by the death-bed of a
primate of this class. Peter Stonecrop was
one of the earliest inhabitants of this colony
and his death will make sensation. OF his
beginning, which must have been tolerably OBJ
scure, know nothing but he was an illiterate
man, and sordd from the first known of him.
He got large tract of land here, when grants
were going as freely as the winds or>the clouds.
He never cultivated it. He bought more land
cheap, dog cheap-but he never cultivted it.
What he got he kept, for he spent nothing. A
hut, scarcely fit for laborcr was his sole
abode. He never could afford to marry He
was in this respect more pcnurious than Long
Clarke, a congener, aud the prince Of land
sharks.
"Pcter Stonecrop is little behind his cele-
brated chief, mean in accumulation of lands.
Though to-day he possesses but some six feet
of earth, yesterday he was lord of fifty thou
sand acres. In one respect his influence has
been more mischievouS than CIarke's for he
has contrived to pitch, with singular foresight,
on a whole host of places that must in the ma
tnre of things, become populous and influential
Where port was needed, they had to repur-
chase the site from Stonecrop, at cent. per cent
cost. Where town should spring up, the
purchases of Stonecrop stood in the way, and
turned the tide of building into far worse po-
sition. Where families longed to settle, and
saw in imagination fertile farms and happy
homes, Stonecrop had put his hand on the waste
and waste it rAnained. Thus have this man
and his congeners, gone on oLstructing settle
ment, distorting progress, pushing back from
the warm sunshine of existence thousands of hui
man creatures because there was no place for
them in the new and beautiful lands which God
has revealed to the deserving uses of crowded
Europe. Imagine Battery Point, in Hobart
Town. with its magnificent situation on the cs-
tuary, and in the very centre of the new me-
tropolis, being bought by the father of the
present excellent termode for eight hundred
pounds. Imagine what it is worth now, with
its sites, its buildings, its capabilities, nay, its
necessities-every foot of earth precious as so
much gold-dust. 1t is such startling, promi-
nent, exciting spectacles, that have created the
tribe of voracious, yet indigesting land-sharks.
But it is in Victoria that the race and the mis-
chief have at length eliminated There, the
in-rushing torrents of gold-seekers have found
the squatter and the land-shark in coalition
terrible as an antarctic frost. What the one
was compelled to reluctantly let 90, the other
seized. The land-shark was before the popu-
lation, but certain of its arrival, purchasing up
large tracts when they were to be had. Wher-
ever the government offered modicums of land
to the clamorous public, the land-shark was
there, and outbid them, because he could wait,
and knew that the higher the pressure Of popu-
lation the higher the price, You are no stran-
gers to the outcries on that side the Straits for
land the indignant remonstrance aud the re-
Hnx of despairing emigrants from those fair and
fertile shores, where the squatter and the land
shark reign-the lords Of a monopoly that
amazes all wise men, and fills the valleys and
prsiries Of America with millions on millions of
people meant by Providence for the planters