bore what we called a plum, which it resembled in colour, but not in shape, being flat on the sides like a little cheese; and a third, that bore a kind of purple apple, which, after it had been kept a few days, became eatable, and tasted somewhat like a damascene. Here is a great variety of plants to enrich the collection of a botanist, but very few of them are of the esculent kind. A small plant, with long, narrow, grassy leaves, resembling that kind of bulrush which in England is called the Cat’s-tail, yields a resin of a bright yellow colour, exactly resembling gambouge, except that it does not stain; it has a sweet smell, but its properties we had no opportunity to discover, any more than those of many others with which the natives appear to be acquainted, as they have distinguished them by names. I have already mentioned the root and leaves of a plant resembling the coccos of the West Indies, and a kind of bean; to which may be added, a sort of parsley and purselain, and two kinds of yams, one shaped like a radish, and the other round, and covered with stringy fibres: both sorts are very small, but sweet; and we never could find the plants that produced them, though we often saw the places where they had been newly dug up; it is probable that the drought had destroyed the leaves, and we could not, like the Indians, discover them by the stalks. Most of the fruits of this country, such as they are, have been mentioned already. We found one in the southern part of the country resembling a cherry, except that the stone was soft; and another, not unlike a pine-apple in appearance, but of a very disagreeable taste, which is well known in the East Indies, and is called by the Dutch _Pyn Appel Boomen_. Of the quadrupeds, I have already mentioned the dog, and particularly described the kanguroo, and the animal of the opossum kind, resembling the phalanger of Buffon; to which I can add only one more, resembling a polecat, which the natives call _Quoll_; the back is brown, spotted with white, and the belly white unmixed. Several of our people said they had seen wolves; but, perhaps, if we had not seen tracks that favoured the account, we might have thought them little more worthy of credit than he who reported that he had seen the devil. Of bats, which hold a middle place between the beasts and the birds, we saw many kinds, particularly one which, as I have observed already, was larger than a partridge; we were not fortunate enough to take one either alive or dead, but it was supposed to be the same as Buffon has described by the name of _Rouset_ or _Rouget_.