150 THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 



tail, being very common. I brought one home alive, and my 

 little girl used to feed it regularly ; but one day it bit her very 

 severely on the forefinger, and, whether intentional or not, it was 

 with some difficulty that it was made to relinquish its hold. The 

 top of the finger became quite black and discoloured, but the 

 bite, although painful, was, of course, not poisonous ; still the 

 lesson gained by simply feeding a wallop will not have been 

 thrown away. 1 did not see any snakes, as these reptiles are, I 

 believe, scarce ; but I had a very pretty Utde specimen of the 

 ringed snake, " Vermicilla," given me. It was taken out of an 

 old mallee stump, near to Lake Hindmarsh. 



I had hoped to have been able to spend a few days in the 

 Ninety-mile Desert ; but, upon my arrival back at Border Town, 

 I read a telegram informing me of the illness of my wife, so I 

 had very reluctantly to make a start for home much earlier than 

 I had expected. What little time I had to spare was spent ia 

 collecting near the Victorian boundary, and it was here I found 

 the rare Siyphelia Woodsii ; and, in a drain alongside the road, I 

 was fortunate enough to find Lepilcena australis, a plant also new 

 for Victoria, and only previously recorded from Western Australia. 

 Baron von Mueller, who has been kind enough to identify these 

 plants for me, was very pleased to be able to add these two inter- 

 esting plants to the Victorian flora. I had now to leave for home ; 

 so, after making a short run up towards Mount Monster, I left 

 Border Town by the midday train for Serviceton, which was 

 reached in good time. I left the next morning for Diapur Town, 

 about twenty-five miles nearer to Dimboola, and reached there at 

 9 a.m. 1 spent the day in collecting, and found it a very good 

 place for plants, the mallee reaching to within a few hundred 

 yards of the township. Diapur Town, I may explain, is an agri- 

 cultural district, wheat-growing being carried on rather extensively, 

 as many as 25,000 bags of wheat being stored at the railway 

 station a few weeks prior to my being there. 



The country to the S.W. is composed of dwarf stringy-bark 

 ranges, very dry and poor, contrasting strongly with that to the 

 N.W. and S.E., which is open grass country, lightly covered with 

 casuarina (bull oak) and box (E. largiflorens).^ In the Mallee 

 flats, I saw large numbers of plants of the beautiful pink-flowered 

 melaleuca, M. Wihonii, but as it was too early for the flowers, 

 I had to content myself by collecting a nice lot of seed-capsules. 

 Some very robust plants of Callistemon, also not yet in bloom, 

 were common enough in the old and now dried-up water-courses. 



The beautiful yellow-flowering shrub, Erioste//ion lepidolus 

 (variety, stenophyllus), is very common about Diapur Town, and 

 this fine plant would, I am sure, be a welcome addition to our 

 shrubberies. 



In the drier parts of the Mallee I noticed a great variety of 



