AUSTRALIAN VEGETATION. 169 
mapping. It would thus be unsafe to assume that the great western 
half of the interior consists mainly of desolate uninhabitable desert 
country, or even to contend that the reappearance on Termination 
Lake, or on the Murchison river, of so very many of the plants which 
give to the Saltbush country, or the Mallee and Brigalow scrubs, on 
the extensive depression of the Darling system, their physiognomy, 
necessitates their uninterrupted extension from the rear of Arnhem's 
Land to the Murray Desert, or to Shark Bav. From demonstrating 
tacts like these we dare no more infer but that it is likely many similar 
tracts of flat country are stretching over portions of the wide inter- 
vening spaces. But who will predict more? May not the large sys- 
tem of salt lakes formed by the drainage of rain into cavities of saline 
Hats be found limited to the less distant portions of the interior of 
Western Australia, and may it not thus, by a gradual rise of the 
ground (evidently manifest northerly), give place to a system of 
freshwater lakes or lagoons, or even of such springs as rewarded 
the exertions of the keenly-searching explorers west of Lake Eyre ? 
And although it must be admitted that no ranges simultaneously 
lofty and wooded, and thus originating springs and rivulets for the 
formation of larger rivers, are likely to exist to any extent in the 
extra-tropical part of the western interior, because such rivers have not 
found their way to the coast, yet it is still possible, and rather pro- 
% that mountains as high and much less bare than Gawler Range, 
and even much more extensive, may give rise to interior watercourses, 
n S which the dwellings of new colonists may be established, and to 
winch our pasture animals may flock, but which in their sluggish pro- 
gress cannot force their way to the ocean, and are thus lost in nume- 
rous more or less ample inland basins. Years hence, on even less 
avoured spots, artesian borings may afford the means of stay for a 
ense population, — should,as may be anticipated, mineral riches prove to 
b e scattered not merely over the vicinity of the west coast and Spencer's 
ulf, but also over interjacent areas of similar geological structure. 
01 'k's Peninsula, close to settlements, was long left an uninhabited 
and des olate spot, until its rich store of copper-ore was disclosed. So 
° ther ^mapped parts of Australia are also likely to prove rich ; and, 
although not equal facilities for the transit of the mineral treasures 
w °uld always exist, its discovery would be certain to lead to the occu- 
patl0n of the country, and to the extension of pastoral colonization, 
babl 
