1ST MARCH.--When, fifteen years before, I visited this river at a higher point where it was called the Karaula [*], no trace of hoofs of horses or bullocks had been previously imprinted on the clayey banks. Now, we found it to be the last resource of numerous herds in a dry and very hot season, and so thickly studded were the banks of this river with cattle stations, that we felt comparatively at home. The ordinary precautionary arrangements of my camp against surprise by savage natives seemed quite unnecessary, and, to stockmen, almost ridiculous. We had at length arrived at the lowest drain of that vast basin of clay absorbing many rivers, so that they lose themselves as in the ocean. Here the final outlet or channel of the waters of the Macquarie, was but a muddy ditch one might step across, which the magnificent flood we had seen in the same river above the marshes was not at all likely to reach. That flood had gone to fill thousands of lagoons, without which supply, those vast regions had been unfit for animal existence. Here we discover another instance of that wonderful wisdom which becomes more and more apparent to man, when he either looks as far as he can into space, or attentively examines the arrangement of any matter more accessible to him. The very slight inclination of the surface of these extensive plains seems finely adapted to the extremely dry and warm climate over this part of the earth. If the interior slope of the land from the eastern coastranges were as great as that in other countries supplying rivers of sustained current, it is obvious that no water would remain in such inclined channels here; but the slope is so gentle that the waters spread into a net-work of reservoirs, that serve to irrigate vast plains, and fill lagoons with those floods that, when confined in any one continuous channel, would at once run off into the ocean. [* We then understood the natives very imperfectly and might have been wrong about the name, which is the more likely, as CARAWY, which the name resembles, means any deep water-hole.]