The reports of late sent in respecting the climate have, in some measure, been unfavourable; and, as I have observed, the appearance of the garrison was rather sickly; but may not this arise partly from the indifferent manner in which they are housed?  Small, low, thatched cottages, in a temperature much too warm for Europeans to labour in constantly, are apt to engender disease.  There is, besides, a mangrove swamp immediately behind the settlement, which at present decreases its salubrity.  With regard to the range of the thermometer, it has been known as low as 62 degrees, and it is never so high, by ten or twenty degrees, as I have seen it in South Australia during the hot winds:  the average, however, is about 83 degrees.  The fact that the site of Victoria lies so far from the entrance of the harbour is injurious to its prosperity, as it prevents many vessels from calling, and deprives it of the breezes that constantly prevail on the coast, and would of course conduce to its healthiness.*

(Footnote.  The following remarks from Mr. Bynoe, on the climate of Northern Australia, corroborate the views put forward in the text: 

I find on a reference to the Medical Journals, as well as to a Meteorological table kept by me during a period of six years, on the coasts of Australia, and under every variety of climate, that we had no diseases peculiar to that continent, and I am led to believe it a remarkably healthy country.  On the North and North-west coasts, where you find every bight and indentation of land fringed with mangroves, bordering mud flats, and ledges formed by corallines in every stage of decomposition, with a high temperature, no fevers or dysenteries were engendered.

Our ship’s company were constantly exposed, in boats, to all the vicissitudes from wet to dry weather, sleeping in mangrove creeks for many months in succession, pestered by mosquitoes during the hours of repose, yet they still remained very healthy; and the only instance where the climate was at all prejudicial (if such a term can be applied) was in the Victoria River, on the north coast, where the heat was, at one period, very great, and the unavoidable exposure caused two of the crew to be attacked with Coup de Soleil.

Our casualties consisted of two deaths during our stay on the Australian coast, one from old age; and the other, a case of dysentery, contracted at Coepang.

It may not be uninteresting to state, that from the time that Port Essington was settled in 1838, up to the period of our last visit to that military post, and for some time after, no endemial form of disease had manifested itself, and the only complaints that the men had been suffering from were diseases such as were usually to be met with in a more temperate clime, and those were few.  But we must take into consideration their isolated position, the constant sameness of their life, their small low thatched cottages, mostly with earthen floors; their inferior diet, and