ssist the first impulse acquired in their descent, it must
necessarily cease to flow at one point or other. Such is the case with the
Lachlan, the Macquarie, the Castlereagh, and the Darling. Whence the
latter originates, still remains to be ascertained; but most undoubtedly
its sources have been influenced by the same drought that has exhausted
the fountains of the three first mentioned streams.

In supporting his opinion of the probable discharge of the interior waters
of Australia upon its north-west coast, Mr. Cunningham thus remarks in the
publication from which I have already made an extract.

"To those remarkable parts of the north-west coast above referred to in
the parallel of 16 degrees south, the Macquarie river, which rises in
lat. 33 degrees, and under the meridian of 150 degrees east, would have a
course of 2045 statute miles throughout, while the elevation of its
source, being 3500 feet above the level of the sea as shown by the
barometer, would give its waters an average descent of twenty inches to
the mile, supposing the bed of the river to be an inclined plane.

"The Gwydir originating in elevated land, lying in 31 degrees south, and
long. 151 degrees east, at a mean height of 3000 feet, would have to flow
2020 miles, its elevated sources giving to each a mean fall of seventeen
inches.

"Dumaresq's river falling 2970 feet from granite mountains, in 28 1/4
degrees under the meridian of 152 degrees, would have to pursue its course
for 2969 miles, its average fall being eighteen inches to a mile."

As I have never been upon the banks either of the Gwydir or the Dumaresq,
I cannot speak of those two rivers; but in estimating the sources of the
Macquarie at 3500 feet above the level of the sea, Mr. Cunningham has lost
sight of, or overlooked the fact, that the fall of its bed in the first
two hundred miles, is more than 2800 feet, since the cataract, which is
midway between Wellington Valley and the marshes, was ascertained by
barometrical admeasurement, to be 680 feet only above the ocean. The
country, therefore, through which the Macquarie would have to flow during
the remainder of its course of 1700 miles, in order to gain the
N.W. coast, would not be a gradually inclined plain, but for the most part
a dead level, and the fact of its failure is a sufficient proof in itself
how short the course of a river so circumstanced must necessarily be.

MR. OXLEY'S OPINIONS.

Having conversed frequently wit