This expedition, as finally organized under the conduct of Oxley, consisted of Allan Cunningham, as king's botanist, Charles Frazer, as colonial botanist, William Parr, as mineralogist, and eight others. On the 20th of April, 1817, all the members of the expedition met at a store depôt on the bank of the Lachlan River, which had been fixed as the point of departure. The details of their weary wanderings have been recorded only at too great length in Oxley's published journals. The author in the commencement of his work apologized for the uneventful character of the narrative, and if this was necessary when enthusiasm for exploration was at fever heat, the reader of the present day is not likely to consider it superfluous. The fault, however, did not lie with the writer, but is to be attributed to the uninteresting materials which form the staple of his bulky volumes. The country he had to traverse soon turned out to be singularly tame and tedious. The sea coast, with its never-ending scenes of beauty, had been left far behind; the mountain ranges, with their vast and varied grandeur, had sunk below the horizon, and in place of both were found only the dull and dreary plains of the Australian bush. Were it not that the whole of the country was new, this record of daily travel would read like the diary of a conscientious but uneventful life. It will be desirable, therefore, to touch only on the chief points of the narrative. Starting from the point previously indicated, the party proceeded on their travels along the southern bank of the river. Wild fowl appeared in large numbers, offering excellent sport. The natives also were met with more frequently than would have been agreeable had they been disposed to be troublesome, which, fortunately, they were not. The one thing which surprised the explorers was the behaviour of the Lachlan, which, after showing itself a goodly river of a hundred feet in width, threatened to end its career in a most undignified fashion. This it very soon did, as they believed, by resolving itself into a succession of marshes, to which they gave the name of the Lachlan Swamps. Being unable to trace the river any further, Oxley now resolved to abandon the enterprise and return home by a different route. He made up his mind, accordingly, to make for the southern coast, which he hoped to strike about Cape Northumberland, and thence reach Sydney by sea. In this direction the course was steered till the 4th of July, when further progress became extremely difficult, from the sterility of the country and almost interminable forests of mallee, which Oxley, in a play of the imagination, named the Euryalean scrub. At last it became apparent to all that they would have to return to the Lachlan, through the want of water, if for no other cause, and this was now done. The retrograde movement was singularly unfortunate. Had they proceeded only twenty miles further the Murrumbidgee would have been discovered, with its