Country between Moreton Bay anti Port Essington. 95 
and Port Essington. Should good harbours be found, and 
settlements be established on those points of division, they would 
scarcely be as far from each other as Sydney from Port Phillip, 
and the overland communication would be probably equally easy, 
or would be rendered so after a very short time. 
I shall mention once more those facts which have induced me 
to suppose that part of the country had been remarkably dry for 
a succession of years. 
1. The condition oflarge channels of rivers and creeks, which 
were either entirely dry or contained only tiny streams not at all 
proportionate to their widths. 
2. The occurrence of dead crabs and fresh-water turtle on the 
box flats at the east side of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The turtle 
requires a great supply of water, and those skeletons which I 
observed did not seem to have been carried thither by the natives. 
3. Extensive shallows at the west coast of the Gulf, surrounded 
by heaps of dead fresh-water muscle-shells, of large size, which 
were overgrown by small tea-trees, about four or five years old. 
The muscles must have lived and grown for a number of years in 
those hollows, which were now entirely dry. 
4. The plains of the East Alligator River were covered by dead 
fresh-water shells, particularly limnreas, which must have lived 
and grown in shallow holes and lagoons, which extend all over 
those plains. 
5. Lines of drooping tea-trees along several salt-water creeks 
at the west coast of the Gulf, were dead, in consequence of the 
want of the usual freshes, as the tree seems not to live on water 
entirely salt. 
It seems impossible, in the present state of our information, to 
account for this remarkable phenomenon of the decreasing supply 
of water on the surface of this continent. The supposition of a 
gradual rise of the land would explain why arms of the sea recede, 
and parts of the bottom of these become dry; but it would not 
explain the decrease of moisture in the atmosphere, or the greater 
evaporation or absorption of the waters in lagoons, which are not 
connected with any water-course. The rise of the country would 
