f Admiralty Gulf, Vansittart, and Napier Broome
Bay were closely examined with a view to selecting a suitable port for
the district. The most important practical result of the expedition was
the discovery of an area of six million acres of basaltic pastoral
country covered with blue grass, Mitchell and kangaroo grasses, and many
varieties of what is known as top feed. No auriferous country was found,
but some fine specimens of the baobab tree were seen, some of them
averaging fifty feet in diameter.

[Illustration. Typical Australian Explorers of the early Twentieth
Century.]

We have now turned the last page of the story of those bold spirits who
played no mean part in the making of Australasia by exploring the
continent. For nearly a century and a quarter the white man had been
restlessly searching out and traversing every square mile of the land,
and now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, his work is finished.
And throughout the long struggle it had ever been a stubborn conflict
between the explorer and the inert forces of Nature. Through the weary
toilsome years of arduous discovery, Man and Nature had seldom marched
side by side as friends and allies. When Nature posed as the explorer's
friend and guide, it was often only to lure him on with a smiling face to
his doom. From the days when the soldier of King George the Third went
forth with his firelock on his shoulder, computing the distance he
covered by wearily counting the number of paces he trudged, to the day
when the modern adventurer aloft on his camel eagerly scans the horizon
of the red desert in search of the distant smoke of a native fire, and
then patiently tracks the naked denizen of the wilderness to his hoarded
rock-hole or scanty spring, the explorer has ever had to fight the battle
of discovery unaided by Nature. The aborigines generally either feigned
ignorance of the nature of the country, or gave only false clues and
misguiding directions. Even the birds and animals of the untrodden
regions seemed to resent the advance of civilization, and to delight in
leading the footsteps of the white intruder astray. Hence it was by slow
degrees, by careful study of the work of his predecessors in the field,
and often by heeding the warning conveyed in their unhappy fate, that the
Australian explorer added to the sum of knowledge of his country, and
step by step unveiled the hidden mysteries of the continent.

INDEX OF NAMES OF PERSONS.

Andre