May 24, 1858.] 
AUSTRALIA. 
313 
in Australia will find a clear and well condensed historical review * 
of the same by Dr. Ferdinand Mueller, to whom I have already 
alluded, and to whose valuable labours due reference was made 
at our last Anniversary. Excluding from this summary all that 
relates to maritime survey, the author enumerates the explorers of 
the interior in the last 40 years, and indicates the amount of dis- 
covery made successively by Evans, Oxley, Allan Cunningham, 
Hume and Hovell, Sturt, Mitchell, Henty, Grey and Lushington, 
Strzelecki, Clark, Wickham and Stokes, Eyre, Leichhardt, and 
Kennedy. Dr. Mueller renders his article doubly valuable by 
giving in Mr. Gregory’s own words a description of the physical 
geography of Western Australia, in which country that geographer 
was so long a resident. He further sketches with the pen of one 
well acquainted with the country the outline of his late journey 
from Tropical or Northern Australia, and brings together the 
various notices of recent journeys in South Australia, by Hack, 
Babbage, and certain settlers, and concludes that any rivers which 
would afford the means of penetrating far inland can nowhere be 
expected to exist (setting aside the mighty Murray and its tribu- 
taries), unless they be found between the FitzRoy River of North- 
West Australia and Shark Bay, a region where we have no settle- 
ment, and the coast of which has not yet been surveyed. 
Colonel Gawler has also printed a little summary of geographical 
discoveries during 1857, to the west and north of Eyria in South 
Australia, to strengthen what he considers to be the evidence that 
the “ country to the west of Lake Torrens is the true and practicable 
line of communication for rail and common road and electric tele- 
graph between the south-eastern provinces of Australia, the great 
interior, Stokes’s Victoria river, and the north-western coast in 
general.” However incredulous I still am, as to the discovery of 
any considerable extent of really valuable country in the region to 
the north of La'ke Torrens, or in finding habitable and rich oases in 
the great central portion of the continent, towards which the 
country seems to lower and become saline, and notwithstanding 
that I think Colonel Gawler’s views too sanguine, it would ill 
become the President of this Society to damp the ardour of those 
researches by which alone the question can be permanently settled. 
Mr. Hack has already laid open a band of country fitted for 
pasture, and furnished with supplies of water, which lies between 
the great saline tract of the seabord explored by Eyre, and the 
* Read before the Institute of Melbourne, 25th Nov., 1857. 
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