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of the mounds present a pleasing green appearance, from being covered ■with a sward 
of Pimbristylis, in such masses, fallen or recumbent, as to form a safe carpet, yielding 
and soft, but dense enough to support cattle going in to feed on the various grasses 
found there. 
“ Tn ancient days the same springs have proved a trap for too-confiding animals, 
as is proved by the fact of some bones haviinj been ejected in the mud from one of 
them; the bones are coloured, but in a good state of preservation.” 
On the Gilliat Hiver, a tributary of the Cloncurry, below the junction of Eastern 
Creek, some mud springs are marked on the ” Si.vteen-mile Colony Map,” but I have 
neither seen nor been able to obtain any description of them. 
Einasleigh Hot Springs .' — I visited these Springs in November, 1889, in company 
with Mr. A. Gibb Maitland. 
The Springs have been known for abotit eighteen years, but the knowledge was 
for a long time confined to the station hands. Of late years, however, a few pleasure 
parties have gone out to visit them from Georgetown, the centre of the Etheridge Gold 
Field, from which they are distant about forty-five miles, and, since the opening of 
Croydon Gold Field, in 1886, a few rheumatic and other invalids have camped on the 
Einasleigh and bathed in the hot water. Jlr. C. A. Vogan read a Paper on the Springs 
in September, 1888, before the Geographical Society in Sydney. 
The Springs are best reached by following the river down from Cobb and Co.’s 
Stage on the coach road at the crossing of the Einasleigh. As the left bank of the 
river is flanked by rough broken country for some distance, it is best to keep the right 
bank for three miles and then cross to the left bank. The crossing presents no difficulty, 
as although the river is here nearly a hundred miles from its source and almost half-a-mile 
wide, its bed is, in ordinary seasons, a sandy waste, only relieved by occasional 
waterholes. 
About six miles below the road the traveller is guided to the Springs by a small 
cloud of vapour rising from a mound partly concealed by trees in the middle of an 
allu'vial flat, and distant about a quarter of a mile from the left bank of the river. 
On closer inspection the mound proves to be a dome-shaped mass fifteen feet in 
height and two hundred yards in circumference, rising out of a plain of recent alluvial 
deposits. That the latter are of no great thickness is shown by sections on the river 
banks and in gullies, which expose gneiss, granite, and schists very near the surface of 
the plains. 
Scattered over the dome are five distinct springs of clear, blue water, all of 
which, with one exception, leak quietly over their rims without ebullition or geyser 
action. 
The story runs that about nineteen years ago the Georgeto'wn Mailman heard, 
from a distance of two or three miles from the Springs, an explosion and a hissing noise 
like that of escaping steam. Little notice wms taken of this report at the time, but a year 
later the Springs were found in the locality indicated by the mailman. If the story is 
true, it would appear that the Springs really do burst into geyser activity at rare intervals. 
The apex of the mound is occupied by a sheet of water which measures roughly five 
by three feet across the mouth of a well which has a depth of six feet (Spring a). This 
Spring discharges by one principal and two minor breaks in the lip of the cup, streams 
having an estimated total section of nine square inches. Bubbles of gas continually rise 
to the surface, but at intervals of two and a-half minutes there is a rush of bubbles. 
Eighteen feet north of (a), a pipe (S) of one foot in diameter is filled with seven 
feet of water, which does not rise to the surface of the mound nor discharge by any 
visible orifice. From the surface of the mound to the surface of the water is two feet. 
