The day had been exceedingly hot; but the passing shadows of cumuli which formed in the afternoon, occasionally afforded us a delightful relief.  The sea breeze was strong, particularly towards evening; but the dense scrub and forest kept it from us during the day.

Oct. 18.—­I stopped at the water-holes, to allow our cattle to recover.  It was a lovely place.  The country around us was very open, and agreeably diversified by small clusters of the raspberry-jam tree.  Salicornia and Binoe’s Trichinium indicated the neighbourhood of salt water; but the grass was good and mostly young.  The creek was shaded by drooping tea-trees and the broad-leaved Terminalia, which also grew scattered over the flats.  The water-hole on which we were encamped was about four feet deep, and contained a great number of guard-fish, which, in the morning, kept incessantly springing from the water.  A small broad fish with sharp belly, and a long ray behind the dorsal fin, was also caught.  It was highly amusing to watch the swarms of little finches, of doves, and Ptilotis, which came during the heat of the day to drink from our water hole.  Grallina australis, Crows, Kites, Bronze-winged and Harlequin pigeons, (Peristera histrionica, Gould), the Rose cockatoo (Cocatua Eos), the Betshiregah (Melopsittacus undulatus), and Trichoglossus versicolor, Gould, were also visitors to the water-hole, or were seen on the plains.  The day was oppressively hot; and neither the drooping tea-trees, nor our blankets, of which we had made a shade, afforded us much relief Clouds gathered, however, in the afternoon, and we had a few drops of rain in the course of the night and following morning.  Charley and John had gone out on horseback to obtain some emus, with which the country seemed to abound; they returned, however, at night, without any emus, but brought in about twenty-two whistling and black ducks, one goose and several waders, which they had obtained at a lagoon which was several miles in length, and varied from 50 to 300 yards in breadth, covered with Nymphaeas, and fringed with a dense vegetation; it was surrounded by fine pasture.  Never, as they described, had they seen so many ducks and geese together; when they rose, their numbers darkened the air, and their noise was deafening.  They had observed a wooden post, cut with an iron tomahawk, rammed in the ground and propped with several large stones; which seemed to be the work either of white men or Malays.

Oct. 19.—­We travelled about four miles north 30 degrees west, over plains and an open undulating box and raspberry jam tree country, to the lagoon which my companions had discovered.  They had not exaggerated their account, neither of the beauty of the country, nor of the size of the lagoon, nor of the exuberance of animal life on it.  It was indeed quite a novel spectacle to us to see such myriads of ducks and geese rise and fly up and down the lagoon, as we travelled along.  Casuarinas, drooping tea-trees,