We have thus five native names of places in the immediate neighbourhood of Port Phillip, having the termination ng, and we may perhaps add another, the Barwon being probably Barwong.  At King George’s Sound in Western Australia, the names end in up, and again to the eastward, near Gipps’ Land, the final letter is n.  These observations may probably assist in directing the attention of philologists to the subject of the distribution of the Australian dialects or languages.

Ude Youang, or as Captain Flinders named it, Station Peak, is a granite mass elevated 1370 feet above the sea.  At Geelong there is some confusion in the formation.  The rocks, however, that prevail are trappean.

FOSSIL SHELLS.

In digging a well there, a fossil cowrie (Cypraea eximia) of an extinct species was once found at the depth of sixty feet.  Another specimen of the same shell was dug up at Franklin village near Launceston, from a hundred and forty feet below the surface of the soil.  Count Strzelecki gives a figure of it in his interesting work.

Mr. Ronald Gunn, in his observations on the flora of Geelong, observes that out of a hundred species of plants collected indiscriminately, sixty-seven were also to be found in Tasmania, leaving only thirty-three to indicate the peculiarities of the Geelong vegetation.

Some of the officers of the Beagle exhibited at this place symptoms of being infected with the land-speculating mania we had witnessed at Melbourne, by bidding for some of the allotments of the township of Geelong, which were just then selling.  One that was bought for 80 pounds might have been sold a year afterwards for 700 pounds.  I mention this fact that the reader may see what a ruinous system was then in vogue.

ARTHUR’S SEAT.

On the morning of January 5, we left Geelong, touched at Hobson’s Bay for a chronometric departure, and proceeded to sea by the south channel.  Arthur’s Seat is a good guide for its entrance from Hobson’s Bay, the channel passing close under the foot of it.  The eastern extremity of the northern banks, we found very difficult to make out, from the water being but slightly discoloured on it.  It is, moreover, on account of its steepness, dangerous to approach.  From this eastern corner of the bank, Arthur’s Seat bears South 50 1/2 degrees West and a solitary patch of cliff, westward of the latter, South 68 degrees East.

In consequence of bad weather it was three days before we passed through the channel, which, we were pleased to find navigable for line of battle ships.  A West 3/4 North course led through, and the least water was five fathoms on a bar at the eastern entrance, where the width is only three-tenths of a mile, whilst in the western it is one mile, with a depth of seventeen fathoms.  When in the latter we saw Flinders Point between Lonsdale and Nepean Points, and as we came down the channel, the last two points were just open of each other.