well as the valleys
were generally covered with good grass, excepting in the scrub. On some
of the hills the rocks were shivered into irregular pieces, and displayed
crystals of quartz, small laminae of mica, and occasionally hornblende.
This evening we camped by the side of a fine casuarina creek, coming from
the north-east. Immediately over our camp its waters ran over a very hard
trap-rock of a black colour, the soil a stiff loam.

August 16.

We travelled on for the most part of this day over irregular, barren,
stony ridges, and gullies, intersected by numerous small creeks, and
abounding in rocky holes, all containing plenty of water.

Two more of our horses fell several times this day; one of them being
very old, and so weak that we were obliged to lift him up. We now made up
our minds for the first time, to make our horses, when too weak to
travel, available for food; we therefore killed him, and took meat enough
from his carcass to serve our party for two days, and by this means we
saved a sheep. We boiled the heart, liver, and a piece of the meat to
serve us for our breakfast next day. We camped in the evening in the
midst of rocky, broken hills, covered with dwarf shrubs and stunted
gumtrees; the soil in which they grew appearing more sandy than what we
had yet passed on this side of the range. The shrubs here were Dodonaea,
Fabricia, Daviesia, Jacksonia, and two or three dwarf species of acacia,
one of which was very showy, about three feet high, with very small
oblong, sericeous phyllodia, and globular heads of bright yellow flowers,
produced in great abundance on axillary fascicles; also a very fine
leguminous shrub, bearing the habit and appearance of Callistachys, with
fine terminal spikes of purple decandrous flowers, with two small
bracteae on the foot-stalk of each flower, and with stipulate, oval,
lanceolate leaves, tomentose beneath, legumes small and flattened, three
to six-seeded, with an arillus as large as the seed; these were flowering
from four to twelve feet high. There was plenty of grass in the valleys
of the creeks. To the South-West on the hills the grasses were Restio,
Xerotes, and a spiny grass, which neither the horses nor the sheep would
eat.

August 17.

This morning we commenced to prepare our breakfast of horse-flesh. I
confess we did not feel much appetite for the repast, and some would not
eat it at all; but our scruples soon gave way beneath the pangs of
hunger, and at sup