9d fitzboy island. 



a short time to form a station, we finally came to 

 under Fitzroy Island, half a mile from the shore. 

 This island is about five miles in circumference, hig-h 

 and well-wooded, with two peaks, one of which is 861 

 feet in height. The rock, when exposed, is g"ranitic. 

 The small bay on the western side of the island, 

 where the ship lay, has a steep beach of iragments 

 of dead coral, through which oozes the water of two 

 streamlets, at one of which the ship completed her 

 stock with great facility. Following upwards one 

 of the two branches of the principal stream through 

 a narrow gully, one reaches a small basin-like 

 valley, filled with dense brush, through which it is 

 difiicult to pass, on account of the unusual quantity 

 of the prickly Calamus palm. Several trees of the 

 pomegranate (Punica Granatum) were met with 

 bearing fruit ; as this plant is found wild in India, 

 and here occurred in the centre of a thick brush not 

 likely to have been visited by Europeans, it is 

 probably indigenous. A kind of yam (JDioscorea 

 bulbifera) was found here, and proved good eating. 

 In consequence of this, a party from the ship was 

 sent to dig for more, but, having mistaken the plant, 

 they expended aU their time and trouble in rooting 

 up a convolvulus, with small, inedible, and probably 

 cathartic tubers. 



A new species of large Iruit-eating bat, or " flying- 

 fox," {Pteropus conspicillatus), making the third 

 Australian member of the genus, was discovered 

 here. On the wooded slope of a hill I one day fell 



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