covered with pebbles, whilst even at the highest floods secondary banks restrained the river from doing the smallest damage:  these secondary banks might be from six to eight hundred feet in width, and I think the highest marks of flood did not exceed twenty feet perpendicular.  The rapids were usually formed by small stony islands, which. dividing the stream rendered it shoaler in those places than in others, but they never extended above one hundred yards, and were none of them fordable.  Limestone of the best quality and of various species abounded; and it appeared to me to be as common as the other stone forming the hills, which was a fine and hard granite.  We passed through this charming country for upwards of twelve miles, the course of the river during that time being nearly north, and from appearances we thought it must continue in that direction for a considerable distance farther.  A perpendicular limestone rock overhanging the river terminated our excursion; adjoining to this rock (which was called Hove’s Rock, from its being covered with a beautiful new species of hovia), a stratum of fine blue-slate was found.  A little lower down, the bank on the east side was formed of perpendicular red earth cliffs at least sixty feet high, extending along the reach nearly three quarters of a mile; this bank was named Red Bank:  a fine grassy hill thinly covered with wood rose eastward of it.

The timber was unusually fine, consisting chiefly of very large and straight blue guns; beautiful large casuarina trees were occasionally growing at the very edge of the water.  The tops and sides of the rocky precipices on the west side of Wellington Vale were clothed with cypress trees, which had all the appearance of the pinus silvestris, that adorns the mountains and glens of Scotland.  It was nearly five o’clock before we returned to our tent, highly gratified with our day’s excursion.

Nothing can afford a stronger contrast than the two rivers, Lachlan and Macquarie; different in their habit, their appearance, and the sources from which they derive their waters, but above all differing in the country bordering on them; the one constantly receiving great accession of water from four streams, and as liberally rendering fertile a great extent of country; whilst the other, from its source to its termination, is constantly diffusing and extenuating the waters it originally receives over low and barren deserts, creating only wet flats and uninhabitable morasses, and during its protracted and sinuous course is never indebted to a single tributary stream.  The contrast indeed presents a most remarkable phenomenon in the natural history of the country, and will furnish matter in other parts of this Journal, for such conclusions as my observations have enabled me to form.

August 22—­Among the other agreeable consequences that have resulted from discovering the river in this second Vale of Tempe, may be enumerated, as not the least, the abundance of fish and emus with which, we have been supplied; swans, and ducks, were also within our reach, but we had no shot.  Very large muscles were found growing among the reeds along some of the reaches; many exceeded six inches in length, and three and a half in breadth.  Traces of cattle were found in various places as low as Hove’s Rock, which are now doubtless straying through the country.