68 
NATURE NOTES 
for water. One of the party on reaching the summit of the 
Ashburton Range said, “ Why, there is a big lake ! ” The 
rest laughed at him — told him that it was a mirage on Sturt’s 
Plain. They searched all next day in vain for water, and at 
length the man said, “ Mirage or no mirage, I am going to see.” 
He went, and found a beautiful fresh-water lake twenty miles 
across. 
Near Powell’s Creek the ground is covered with agates and 
jaspers, many of the pebbles being extremely beautiful. At 
Renner Spring is a mountain of quartzite which is the great 
quarry for aboriginal knives and spear-heads. Some are made 
of opaline quartz, others very beautifully of glass or broken 
insulators ; these last are scarcely distinguishable from the 
opaline quartz. Stone axes are now very rare, but I was 
fortunate enough to obtain three. 
In the Davenport Ranges there is an amphitheatre of 
quartzite hills, in the centre of which a space of a mile square 
is filled with gigantic granite boulders, many of them almost 
perfectly spherical and from ten to five-and-twenty feet in 
diameter. These huge blocks have a most weird appearance 
and are known as the Devil’s Marbles. 
The Central Australian natives are a finely-made race, the 
men are handsome and active, the youths distinctly Italian- 
looking, while the men have bushy black beards and strongly 
Jewish features. 
On the Fincke River the cliffs are composed of layers of red 
and yellow and pink sandstone with white gypsum and very 
thin layers of black ironstone, the effect of which is marvellously 
brilliant. 
Not more than one-third of the country traversed was of any 
use for pastoral purposes. 
[I am indebted to the Curator of the Sydney Botanical 
Gardens for many of the names of the plants.] 
NOTES ON LONDON BIRDS IN 1901. 
HE following notes are a continuation of those which 
have appeared for some years past in Nature Notes, 
and relate chiefly to Kensington Gardens and Hyde 
Park. 
On the afternoon of January 28 I was going down Piccadilly 
on the top of an omnibus and snow was falling. A woodpigeon 
was sitting on her nest in Green Park close to Walsingham 
House. My sister saw one sitting on a nest in Hyde Park, near 
Park Lane, on February 7. With a little diligent search I 
expect that the London woodpigeon could be found nesting in 
every month of the year. 
