But the east coast and the country at the back of the new settlement of Moreton Bay, now commands our attention, Such an important discovery as that made by Cunningham of the Darling Downs, needless to say, attracted the attention of the graziers of the settled districts in search of fresh pastures. The country west of the Darling having received such an unfavourable name from the explorers who had made any efforts beyond it. The westward march of the overlanders was checked in that direction, and their stock spread to the north, south, and south-cast. In March 1840, Patrick Leslie, who has always been considered the father of settlement on the Darling Downs, left an outside station in New England, and after a short inspection of the scene of Cunningham's discovery, finally, in the middle of the year, settled down on the Condamine. In 1841 the Condamine River was followed for a hundred miles by Messrs. Stuart and Sydenham Russell, from below Jimbour, the northernmost station on a Darling Downs creek; and on the return journey some of the party made an attempt to cross the range to the Wide Bay district, but were prevented by the scrub. In the following month, November, the flow of the Condamine was again picked up in the space below Turnmervil, the lowest station on a creek above Jimbour, and the channel of the river distinguished, where it was formerly supposed to have been for awhile lost. An extensive tract of rich grazing country was found open and well-watered by anabranches, with lagoons in their beds. This district has ever since borne the well-known name of Cecil Plains, then bestowed on it. In 1842 Stuart Russell went from Moreton Bay to Wide Bay in a boat, and made an examination of some of the streams there emptying into the sea. Amongst other adventures the party picked up with an escaped convict who had been fourteen years with the blacks. During the same year Stuart Russell explored the country from Wide Bay to the Boyne (not the river named by Oxley in Port Curtis), and subsequently followed and laid down this stream throughout, crossing from inland waters on to the head of it. Russell's work in opening up so much available country, is a fair sample of the private explorations before referred to, which fill up such a large space of the record of discovery, and yet have received so little recognition that the remembrance of most of them has been quite lost, or preserved in such a way as to be hardly looked upon as reliable history.