The modern explorers are of a different class, and perhaps of one not so high as their predecessors. By this remark I do not mean anything invidious, and if any of the moderns are correctly to be classed with the ancients, the Brothers Gregory must be spoken of next, as being the fittest to head a secondary list. Augustus Gregory was in the West Australian field of discovery in 1846. He was a great mechanical, as well as a geographical, discoverer, for to him we are indebted for our modern horses' pack-saddles in lieu of the dreadful old English sumpter horse furniture that went by that name; he also invented a new kind of compass known as Gregory's Patent, unequalled for steering on horseback, and through dense scrubs where an ordinary compass would be almost useless, while steering on camels in dense scrubs, on a given bearing, without a Gregory would be next to impossible; it would be far easier indeed, if not absolutely necessary, to walk and lead them, which has to be done in almost all camel countries. In 1854 Austin made a lengthened journey to the east and northwards, from the old settled places of Western Australia, and in 1856 Augustus Gregory conducted the North Australian Expedition, fitted out under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society of London. Landing at Stokes's Treachery Bay, Gregory and his brother Frank explored Stokes's Victoria River to its sources, and found another watercourse, whose waters, running inland, somewhat revived the old theory of the inland sea. Upon tracing this river, which he named Sturt's Creek, after the father of Australian exploration, it was found to exhaust itself in a circular basin, which was named Termination Lake. Retracing the creek to where the depot was situated, the party travelled across a stretch of unknown country for some two hundred miles, and striking Leichhardt's Port Essington track on Leichhardt's Roper River, his route was followed too closely for hundreds of miles until civilisation was reached. My friend Baron von Mueller accompanied this expedition as botanist, naturalist, surgeon and physician.