THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN FLORA. 133 
of water are dried up; but clear rivulets and brooks yet meander 
through the land, fed by the rain which at this season still falls occa- 
sionally. The turf becomes a luxuriant meadow, in which Synge- 
nesious plants of many different species are produced, and form, as 
with us, the last act of the beautiful drama. The turf, of which the 
Stipacee form no small proportion, now ripens its seeds, which, in con- 
junction with the prickly fruit of deena, put him, whom business or 
inclination leads through the tall-grown meadow-grass, to no trifling 
inconvenience. The ground, which a little earlier had been of a rich 
green, now resembles a ripe, but very thinly-sown corn-field ; and the 
number of plants in flower diminishes daily, till at last all vegetable - 
life is reduced to the peculiar form of vegetation of the now dried-up 
rivers and brooks. This epoch arrives at different times in different 
localities, but, as far as my observations reach, never before the end of 
November, and never after the beginning of February. From this 
time I have never found herbaceous plants in flower on the grass-land, 
with the exception of Lobelia gibbosa, which, although wild only in 
a few districts, springs from the dried-up soil with its leafless, fleshy 
stems, 
On these forms of vegetation, altitude seems to have but little influ- 
ence. Mount Barker (2,000 feet above the level of the sea) is regarded 
as the highest mountain of the colony. I have climbed to its summit, 
aud found nothing there, which I have not met with, either before or 
since, at the foot of the mountain. Xanthorrheas and Epacridee cer- 
tainly seem to prefer the mountain; yet rather on account of the stony 
soil than of the elevation, since I found nearly all the alpine species on 
the coarse gravelly soil of the plains also. The species of the western 
plains, on the contrary, and those of the eastern (Murray Scrub), are 
almost always different. The fertile land in the Murray valley also 
possesses many peculiarities, which, however, without entering too — i 
much into detail, I am unable to notice further here. But the character _ 
of its vegetation differs in no respect from the corresponding districts 
of the west. A peculiar vegetation occurs only in the immediate - 
neighbourhood of the sea, in the woods upon the beach overflowed. by : 
the tide, which consists of a Rhizophorea—I believe, Ceriops. This tro-  — 
pical form has a very distinct boundary-line on the side of the 
Scrub, commencing with a shrubby Salicornia, which has taken up its 
position on those parts of the strand farthest removed from the sea. - 
