It was the 13th before we had made good the distance I have above mentioned, when a reddish hillock, of fifty-six feet in elevation, in latitude 19 degrees 48 minutes South, and longitude 120 degrees 36 minutes East, promising a view of the interior, we went to visit it. There was less surf on the beach than we expected, and we landed without much difficulty. Our old friend, the black and white red-bill, or oyster-catcher, was in readiness to greet us, accompanied by a few families of sanderlings, two or three batches of grey plovers, and a couple of small curlews. Crossing the beach, a line of reddish sandstone cliffs, twelve feet in height, was ascended, and found to face a bank of sand, held together by a sort of coarse spinifex. This bank, which ran parallel to the coast, was narrow, subsiding into a valley three quarters of a mile wide, on the opposite side of which rose a hummocky ridge of coarse ferruginous sandstone formation. The valley was covered with brown grass and detached stunted bushes. Water had recently lodged in it, as appeared from the saucer-like cakes of earth broken and curled up over the whole surface. The nature of the soil was shown by the heaps of earth thrown out at the entrances of the holes of iguanas, and other burrowing creatures; it was a mixture of sand, clay, and vegetable matter. VIEW OF INTERIOR. From the highest hillock beyond the valley a view of the interior was obtained: it presents, like most of the portions of the continent we had discovered, the aspect of a dreary plain, clothed with grass and detached clumps of green brushwood. "What a strange country!" was the exclamation that naturally burst from us all, on beholding this immense and apparently interminable expanse, with no rise to relieve the tired eye. As we gazed, our imaginations transported us to the Pampas of South America, which this vast level greatly resembled, except that the motions of no startled deer or ostriches scudding over the country, and leaving a train of dust behind, gave life and animation to the scene. No trace of kangaroos, or of natives, not even the sign of a fire, greeted us on this inhospitable coast. The evidences of animal were as scanty as those of vegetable life. BIRDS. Two brown bustards rose out of the grass; they were of the same size and colour as those seen in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and quite as wary, which was very singular. A couple of specimens of land birds were shot; one of them resembled a Meliphagus, although its stomach was filled with small beetles, finely broken up;* its head was covered with yellow pollen, out of a flower resembling the mallow, which is frequently resorted to by small beetles during the heat of the day, when the petal closing over them they are extracted, with some difficulty, by the bird. The other specimen was a brown grain-feeding kind; it invariably rested on the ground, where in its habits, head erect, tail down, and short, sudden run, it greatly resembled a tit-lark.