so much entangled before I was aware of it, that it took me nearly an hour to get clear, although I had entered but a few yards.  No sooner did I cut one tendril, than two or three others clung around me at the first attempt to move, and where they once clasp they are very difficult to unloose.  Abundance of the shoots, from fifteen to twenty feet long, free from leaves or tendrils, could be obtained, and would be useful for all the purposes to which the common cane is now applied.

At this spot also I met with Dracontium polyphyllum, a beautiful plant, belonging to the natural order Aroideae, climbing by its rooting stems to the tops of the trees, like the common ivy.  This plant has narrow pointed leaves, four inches long, and produces at the ends of the shoots a red spatha, enclosing a cylindrical spadix of yellow flowers.

In many parts the swamp was completely covered with a very strong-growing species of Restio (rope-grass).  On the open ground, between the beach and the swamp, were a few large flooded-gums, and a few Moreton Bay ash trees, and near the beach I found the Exocarpus latifolia.

On the beach, too, just above high-water mark, was a beautiful spreading, lactescent tree, about twenty feet high, belonging to the natural order Apocyneae, with alternate, exstipulate, broad, lanceolate leaves, six to eight inches long, and producing terminal spikes of large, white, sweet-scented flowers, resembling those of the white Nerium oleander, but much larger.  I also met with a tree about twenty feet high belonging to the natural order Dilleniaceae, with large spreading branches, producing at the axilla of the leaves from three to five large yellow flowers, with a row of red appendages surrounding the carpels, and a fine species of Calophyllum, with large dark green leaves, six to eight inches long, two and a half to three inches broad, beautifully veined, and with axillary racemes of white, sweet-scented flowers; the seed being a large round nut with a thin rind, of a yellowish-green colour when ripe.  There were many other interesting plants growing about, but the afternoon turning out wet, I left their examination to stand over till finer weather.

Growing on the beach was a species of Portulaca, a quantity of the young shoots of which I collected, and we partook of them at our supper, boiled as a vegetable.

In the evening after watering our horses, we took them to the camp and gave each of them a feed of corn which we had brought with us for the purpose of strengthening them previous to our starting from Rockingham Bay, on our expedition; but although the grass on which they had been depasturing was coarse, they were with difficulty induced to eat the corn, many of them leaving it almost all behind them.  We then tethered them and folded our sheep, one of which we killed for food.  The ration per week on which the party was now put, was one hundred pounds of flour, twenty-six pounds of sugar, three and a half pounds of tea, with one sheep every alternate day.