Two boats, as already noticed, had been brought all the way from Sydney as part of the furniture of the expedition, and the time seemed to have arrived for their being turned to account. Being found to be in perfect order they were forthwith christened the _Discovery_ and the _Resolution_, and launched on the feeble current of the Darling. But hope was excited to no purpose. The stream was too low and the channel too much impeded to permit of navigation even with the smallest craft, and the undertaking was no sooner initiated than it had to be abandoned. The former plan of the expedition had again to be adopted, and the progress on the Darling was very similar to what it had been on the Bogan. The country traversed was found to be inferior as a whole, only moderately valuable for pastoral purposes, and nowhere adapted for agriculture to any considerable extent. The incidents in this part of the march were neither numerous nor striking. The usual privations arising from want of water were hardly known, as the explorers were never far from the banks of a running stream which takes rank among the foremost in Australia. The saltness of the Darling, which proved such an inconvenience to Sturt, was found by Mitchell to exist in a much less degree, which shows that it must have arisen in part from temporary causes. If Mitchell's narrative is not so rich in thrilling incidents as a sensational reader could have wished, it is especially valuable as a record of the manners and customs of the aborigines of those districts, as they appeared to the eye of this intelligent and observant traveller. Sometimes the description is so life-like that we are almost cheated into the belief of a visible reality, and it is impossible to be indifferent to the exhibition, although the whole race has now well-nigh passed away. The account is very generally the reverse of Captain Sturt's, notwithstanding that both of these eminent explorers must have had in view substantially the same tribes. The judicious reader will scarcely be disposed to agree unreservedly with the Captain when he depicts them as the "most miserable wretches" under the sun; neither will he care to subscribe to the unqualified language of the Major, who describes them as "happy" savages. Truth seldom lies in extremes, and it is to the utmost extreme that these authorities have gone, each in his own way, as determined largely, perhaps, by his idiosyncrasies. But the ethnologist, in particular, will be thankful for the literary photograph of these vanishing tribes which has been preserved in the pages of this journal. The general reader, too, will gladly observe some curious incidents of aboriginal life in the interior of Australia. Mitchell specially notices their adroitness in procuring the wild honey of the bush. With great tact they first attached a piece of light down to the bee, which, on being released, would be sure to make straight for its nest.