356 
Captain Sturt’s Expedition into the 
simultaneously, or were successively formed by the joint effect of 
winds and a gradually retiring sea, or of winds alone, it is impos¬ 
sible to say. When I first crossed the Stony Desert, it appeared 
to me to have been the bed of a former current; and I felt satisfied 
that that conclusion was just when I crossed it at another point 
more than a degree from the first, and noticed the strong proof it 
exhibited of waters having at one time or other swept over it with 
irresistable fury. When we first observed the sandy dunes, their 
general direction was N.E. by N., but they gradually came round 
to, and settled at eighteen degrees to the west of north, or N.N.W. 
nearly, and preserved that bearing with undeviating regularity for 
more than 300 miles. They occasionally ran for ninety miles 
without any break in them, nor am I aware that any disturbance 
occured in them, without some obvious cause. They occurred in 
lines rising parallel to each other, at greater or less distances apart, 
and were divided from each other by long narrow flats. If these 
remarkable accumulations of sand were raised by winds, they 
must have been the prevailing winds, and their present form should 
indicate such an origin; but there was very little difference in 
their ascent on either side, although, generally speaking, their 
faces were more abrupt to the east than to the west, but not more 
than the known prevalence of south-west winds would account for. 
That the Stony Desert is the lowest part of the interior which the 
expedition traversed, was demonstrated from the fall of waters 
being from the north after we had crossed it. But, if I except 
Cooper’s Creek, the fall of which was to the N.W., although a 
minor branch of it inundated the country to the west, we had no 
direct proof of any fall of waters into the Stony Desert from the 
south. All the creeks we saw fell short of it; and it was in itself 
so extremely level that it was impossible to determine the inclina¬ 
tion, or rather the declination of its bed. As far as I could judge 
of it from where I left it, the Stony Desert appeared to extend to 
the N.E. with an increased breadth; and I am led to conclude 
that it stretches up nearly to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and receives 
the waters of every river that has strength to reach it. But it is 
the character of the streams of this continent (its inland streams 
I mean) to terminate in marshes, or to exhaust themselves by 
