clay, which rapidly absorbs the rain and changes into mud; a layer of stiff clay is about one foot below the surface.  The grasses are at present in full ear, and often four feet high; but the tufts are distant, very different from the dense sward at the other side of the Range.  As we left the Myal country of the Condamine, we left also its herbage, abounding in composite, leguminous, and chenopodiaceous plants, with a great variety of grasses.

Oct. 20.—­This morning, at half-past nine o’clock, Messrs. Roper, Hodgson, and Charley, returned with John Murphy and Caleb.  They had strayed about twelve miles from the camp, and had fairly lost themselves.  Their trackers had to ride over seventy miles, before they came up to them, and they would certainly have perished, had not Charley been able to track them:  it was indeed a providential circumstance that he had not left us.  According to their statement, the country is very open, with a fine large creek, which flows down to the Condamine; this is the creek which we passed on the 10th Oct., and which I called “Charley’s Creek.”  The creek first seen by Mr. Hodgson joins this, and we are consequently still on westerly waters.

Thermometer, at sunrise, 54 degrees (in the water 64 degrees); at eight o’clock 64 degrees.  Strong easterly and northerly winds during the last two nights.  It becomes calm at a quarter past three, with the rise of Venus.

Mr. Calvert brought an edible mushroom out of Flourspill Scrub.

The Loranthus of the Myal grows also on other Acacias with glaucous leaves.  A bright yellow everlasting is very fine and frequent.

Oct. 22.—­I left Kent’s lagoon yesterday.  In order to skirt the scrub, I had to keep to the north-east, which direction brought me, after about three miles travelling through open forest, to Mr. Hodgson’s creek, at which John Murphy and Caleb had been lost.  The creek here consists of a close chain of fine rocky water-holes; the rock is principally clay, resembling very much a decomposed igneous rock, but full of nodules and veins of iron-stone.  I now turned to the northward, and encamped at the upper part of the creek.  To-day I took my old course to the north-west, and passed a scrubby Ironbark forest, and flat openly-timbered forest land.  I came again, however, to a Bricklow scrub, which I skirted, and after having crossed a very dense scrubby Ironbark forest, came to a chain of rushy water-holes, with the fall of the waters to the north-east.  The whole drainage of a north-easterly basin, seems to have its outlet, through Charley’s Creek, into the Condamine.

On the banks of Hodgson’s Creek, grows a species of Dampiera, with many blue flowers, which deserves the name of “D. floribunda;” here also were Leptospermum; Persoonia with lanceolate pubescent leaf; Jacksonia (Dogwood); the cypress-pine with a light amber-coloured resin (Charley brought me fine claret-coloured resin, and I should not be surprised to find that it belongs to a different species of Callitris); an Acacia with glaucous lanceolate one-inch-long phyllodia; and a Daviesia; another Acacia with glaucous bipinnate leaves; a white Scaevola, Anthericum, and a little Sida, with very showy blossoms.  Spotted-gum and Ironbark formed the forest; farther on, flooded-gum.