families of sanderlings, two or three batches of grey plovers, and a couple of small curlews.  Crossing the beach, a line of reddish sandstone cliffs, twelve feet in height, was ascended, and found to face a bank of sand, held together by a sort of coarse spinifex.  This bank, which ran parallel to the coast, was narrow, subsiding into a valley three quarters of a mile wide, on the opposite side of which rose a hummocky ridge of coarse ferruginous sandstone formation.  The valley was covered with brown grass and detached stunted bushes.  Water had recently lodged in it, as appeared from the saucer-like cakes of earth broken and curled up over the whole surface.  The nature of the soil was shown by the heaps of earth thrown out at the entrances of the holes of iguanas, and other burrowing creatures; it was a mixture of sand, clay, and vegetable matter.

VIEW OF INTERIOR.

From the highest hillock beyond the valley a view of the interior was obtained:  it presents, like most of the portions of the continent we had discovered, the aspect of a dreary plain, clothed with grass and detached clumps of green brushwood.  “What a strange country!” was the exclamation that naturally burst from us all, on beholding this immense and apparently interminable expanse, with no rise to relieve the tired eye.  As we gazed, our imaginations transported us to the Pampas of South America, which this vast level greatly resembled, except that the motions of no startled deer or ostriches scudding over the country, and leaving a train of dust behind, gave life and animation to the scene.  No trace of kangaroos, or of natives, not even the sign of a fire, greeted us on this inhospitable coast.  The evidences of animal were as scanty as those of vegetable life.

BIRDS.

Two brown bustards rose out of the grass; they were of the same size and colour as those seen in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and quite as wary, which was very singular.  A couple of specimens of land birds were shot; one of them resembled a Meliphagus, although its stomach was filled with small beetles, finely broken up;* its head was covered with yellow pollen, out of a flower resembling the mallow, which is frequently resorted to by small beetles during the heat of the day, when the petal closing over them they are extracted, with some difficulty, by the bird.  The other specimen was a brown grain-feeding kind; it invariably rested on the ground, where in its habits, head erect, tail down, and short, sudden run, it greatly resembled a tit-lark.

(Footnote.  Usually observed in the specimens of this species procured by Dr. Bynoe.)

At daylight on the 14th we continued our exploration from the spot where we visited the shore, marked on the chart as Red Hill; and found that the coast trended West by South to the part fronting the Amphinome Shoals, and that instead of the continued sandy beach were occasional low rocky projections.  Eleven miles from Red Hill, a detached rocky ledge extended two miles from the shore, and at the end of twenty, commenced a line of low red sandstone cliffs five miles in extent.  Here we, for the first time, saw native fires; and the country was evidently higher.