I find on a reference to the Medical Journals, as well as to a Meteorological table kept by me during a period of six years, on the coasts of Australia, and under every variety of climate, that we had no diseases peculiar to that continent, and I am led to believe it a remarkably healthy country. On the North and North-west coasts, where you find every bight and indentation of land fringed with mangroves, bordering mud flats, and ledges formed by corallines in every stage of decomposition, with a high temperature, no fevers or dysenteries were engendered. Our ship's company were constantly exposed, in boats, to all the vicissitudes from wet to dry weather, sleeping in mangrove creeks for many months in succession, pestered by mosquitoes during the hours of repose, yet they still remained very healthy; and the only instance where the climate was at all prejudicial (if such a term can be applied) was in the Victoria River, on the north coast, where the heat was, at one period, very great, and the unavoidable exposure caused two of the crew to be attacked with Coup de Soleil. Our casualties consisted of two deaths during our stay on the Australian coast, one from old age; and the other, a case of dysentery, contracted at Coepang. It may not be uninteresting to state, that from the time that Port Essington was settled in 1838, up to the period of our last visit to that military post, and for some time after, no endemial form of disease had manifested itself, and the only complaints that the men had been suffering from were diseases such as were usually to be met with in a more temperate clime, and those were few. But we must take into consideration their isolated position, the constant sameness of their life, their small low thatched cottages, mostly with earthen floors; their inferior diet, and also the absence or scantiness of vegetables. Most of the men, moreover, experience a constant yearning for home, which, yearly increasing, terminates in despondency, and leaves them open to the attacks of disease. Scorbutic symptoms were at one period very prevalent, arising principally from the poor form of diet; similar cases occurred in a former settlement on that part of the coast, from the same causes; but although Port Essington has been of late visited by sickness, I do not consider it by any means an unhealthy spot.)