burst forth, and can thus satisfactorily account for earthquake or volcano; but it is not to any clashing of properties, or to any visible causes, that the changes of which I speak can be attributed.  They appear rather as the consequences of direct agency, of an invisible power, not as the occasional and fretful workings of nature herself.  The marks of that awful catastrophe which so nearly extinguished the human race, are every day becoming more and more visible as geological research proceeds.  Thus, in the limestone caves at Wellington Valley, the remains of fossils and exuviae, show that their depths were penetrated by the same searching element that poured into the caverns of Kirkdale and other places.  They are as gleams of sunshine falling upon the pages of that sublime and splendid volume, in which the history of the deluge is alone to be found; as if the Almighty intended that His word should stand single and unsupported before mankind:  and when we consider that such corroborative testimonies of his wrath, as those I have noticed, were in all probability wholly unknown to those who wrote that sacred book, the discovery of the remains of a past world, must strike those under whose knowledge it may fall with the truth of that awful event, which language has vainly endeavoured to describe and painters to represent.

CHAPTER VIII.

Environs of the lake Alexandrina—­Appointment of Capt.  Barker to make a further survey of the coast near Encounter Bay—­Narrative of his proceedings—­Mount Lofty, Mount Barker, and beautiful country adjacent—­ Australian salmon—­Survey of the coast—­Outlet of lake to the sea—­ Circumstances that led to the slaughter of Capt.  Barker by the natives—­ His character—­Features of this part of the country and capabilities of its coasts—­Its adaptation for colonization—­Suggestions for the furtherance of future Expeditions.

Environs of the lake Alexandrina.

The foregoing narrative will have given the reader some idea of the state in which the last expedition reached the bottom of that extensive and magnificent basin which receives the waters of the Murray.  The men were, indeed, so exhausted, in strength, and their provisions so much reduced by the time they gained the coast, that I doubted much, whether either would hold out to such place as we might hope for relief.  Yet, reduced as the whole of us were from previous exertion, beset as our homeward path was by difficulty and danger, and involved as our eventual safety was in obscurity and doubt, I could not but deplore the necessity that obliged me to re-cross the Lake Alexandrina (as I had named it in honour of the heir apparent to the British crown), and to relinquish the examination of its western shores.  We were borne over its ruffled and agitated surface with such rapidity, that I had scarcely time to view it as we passed; but, cursory as my glance was, I could not