That, in spite of the monotony of the Great Plain, it is strange to note the fascination it has had for many of the most renowned explorers. Sturt, after being reduced to semi-blindness, found himself compelled to struggle with the desert once more. Eyre, left alone in the wilderness, after his awful experience at the head of the Great Bight, still longed to venture again, and accompanied his friend Sturt as far as ever his duties permitted him. Leichhardt died in harness somewhere in Australia, and Kennedy lost his life in his desire to emulate his former chief, Mitchell. Even the very sterility of the great solitude seems to have been, in its way, a lure to drag men back to encounter it once more. Knowing now as much as we do of the interior, we can hardly help being amused at the theories propounded in the old days by some of the earlier travellers. Oxley was, we know, wedded to the idea of an inland sea. Sturt, too, when he looked on the stony desert, saw in it but the dry channel of some old ocean current; and Eyre was convinced that the interior was nothing but a parched and and desert. One after another, these fallacies were exploded, and now we find that human and animal life can as easily be adapted to the central plain as elsewhere. But the want of knowledge displayed by the natives of anything beyond their immediate surroundings, was one great difficulty in the way of the explorers. The blackfellow of Australia seemed to partake largely of the country he lived in. His whole life was one fight for existence, and not even the sudden advent of a strange race could do more than stir him to a languid curiosity. Bounded, as he always had been, by his surroundings, and never venturing beyond tribal limits, what information he was able to impart was, as a rule, meagre and misleading, and without any good result in the way of assistance to the explorer. True, we find exceptions to this amongst them; two instances may be quoted as exemplifying two different phases of the native character. One is a picture from Sturt's journal, the other from Mitchell. Sturt and his companions were returning to the depôt from one of their northern efforts. Suddenly they came across a party of worn and thirsty natives. What little water the whites had with them they gave them, but it was only a mouthful a-piece, and the natives indicating by signs that they were bound for some distant waterhole, disappeared at a smart trot across the sandhills. They apparently expressed no surprise at the sudden meeting in the desert, although they could not have had the slightest conception of white men before. They seem to have accepted their presence and the friendly drink of water as only a part of their strange existence.