The alluvial flats gradually decreased in breadth, and we journeyed mostly over extensive and barren plains, which in many places approached so near the river as to form a part of its bank.  They were covered with the salsolaceous class of plants, so common in the interior, in a red sandy soil, and were as even as a bowling green.  The alluvial spaces near the river became covered with reeds, and, though subject to overflow at every partial rise of it, were so extremely small as scarcely to afford food for our cattle.  Flooded-gum trees of lofty size grew on these reedy spaces, and marked the line of the river, but the timber of the interior appeared stunted and useless.

Description of the natives; manners and customs of the natives.

We found this part of the Morumbidgee much more populous than its upper branches.  When we halted, we had no fewer than forty-one natives with us, of whom the young men were the least numerous.  They allowed us to choose a place for ourselves before they formed their own camp, and studiously avoided encroaching on our ground so as to appear troublesome.  Their manners were those of a quiet and inoffensive people, and their appearance in some measure prepossessing.  The old men had lofty foreheads, and stood exceedingly erect.  The young men were cleaner is their persons and were better featured than any we had seen, some of them having smooth hair and an almost Asiatic cast of countenance.  On the other hand, the women and children were disgusting objects.  The latter were much subject to diseases, and were dreadfully emaciated.  It is evident that numbers of them die in their infancy for want of care and nourishment.  We remarked none at the age of incipient puberty, but the most of them under six.  In stating that the men were more prepossessing than any we had seen, I would not be understood to mean that they differed in any material point either from the natives of the coast, or of the most distant interior to which I had been, for they were decidedly the same race, and had the same leading features and customs, as far as the latter could be observed.  The sunken eye and overhanging eyebrow, the high cheek-bone and thick lip, distended nostrils, the nose either short or acquiline, together with a stout bust and slender extremities, and both curled and smooth hair, marked the natives of the Morumbidgee as well as those of the Darling.  They were evidently sprung from one common stock, the savage and scattered inhabitants of a rude and inhospitable land.  In customs they differed in no material point from the coast natives, and still less from the tribes on the Darling and the Castlereagh.  They extract the front tooth, lacerate their bodies, to raise the flesh, cicatrices being their chief ornament; procure food by the same means, paint in the same manner, and use the same weapons, as far as the productions of the country will allow them.  But as the grass-tree