cattle-breeding is the principal industry, and the one which takes precedence of all others. The chief difficulty encountered by each exploring party has been the penury of natural products of the soil adapted for human food. The traveller is compelled to carry with him a sufficiency of provisions to last him from his departure until his return. It was this insufficiency of rations which wrought the fatal dénouement of the glorious enterprise of Burke and Wills. After reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria, there remained nothing more for Burke and his three companions but to retrace their steps to their depôt at Cooper's Creek. But their energies were exhausted, and from the beginning of April their provisions failed them. At the close of ten or twelve days' march, they were constrained to kill a horse. In the following week, Gray succumbed to the excessive fatigue. The three survivors dragged themselves on to the depôt, where they arrived on the morning of the 21st of April. But the men whom they had left in charge had taken their departure that very morning, after waiting long beyond the time originally fixed for their return. "You may imagine our consternation," says Wills in his Journal, under the date of April 21st; "four months of harassing marches and privations of every kind had completely exhausted our strength. It was an extremely difficult task for either of us to accomplish a distance of only a few yards. The effort necessary to ascend the smallest elevation of the ground, even without a burden, induces an indescribable sensation of pain and helplessness, and the general lassitude makes one unfit for anything." There was no resource now but to rejoin Brahé and his men, if possible. Before quitting the depôt, the latter had left a small supply of provisions, which proved eminently serviceable. On the 23rd Burke, Wills, and King resumed their march, at the rate of four or five miles a-day, in the direction of Mount Despair, which was about sixty miles distant, and where were placed the most advanced posts, northward, of South Australia. A terrible fatality, however, seemed to pursue them; one of their camels, Landa, perished in a bog; the other, Rajah, they were soon forced to kill for food; then they themselves were compelled by sheer exhaustion to return to the depôt, which, meanwhile, had been revisited by Brahé without his discovering a trace of their brief sojourn. Thus abandoned to perish in the Desert, they existed upon the bounty of such natives as they met with, and who occasionally supplied them with a few fish and a little _nardoo_, an aquatic plant whose pounded seeds the aborigines make into bread. Such a regimen was insufficient to restore their exhausted strength. [Illustration: BURKE, WILLS, AND KING IN THE DESERTS OF CENTRAL AUSTRALIA.]