generation as eagerly as the imaginary tales of adventure which, while they appeal to no real sentiment, and convey no solid information, cannot compete for a moment with those sublime records of what has been dared, done, and suffered, at the call of duty, and for the sake of human interests by men who have really lived and died. I do not say that all works of fiction are entirely without interest to the human imagination, or that writers of some of these works are not clever, for in one sense they certainly are, and that is, in only writing of horrors that never occurred, without going through the preliminary agony of a practical realisation of the dangers they so graphically describe, and from which, perhaps, they might be the very first to flee, though their heroes are made to appear nothing less than demigods. Strange as it may appear, it seems because the tales of Australian travel and self-devotion are true, that they attract but little notice, for were the narratives of the explorers not true we might become the most renowned novelists the world has ever known. Again, Australian geography, as explained in the works of Australian exploration, might be called an unlearned study. Let me ask how many boys out of a hundred in Australia, or England either, have ever read Sturt or Mitchell, Eyre, Leichhardt, Grey, or Stuart. It is possible a few may have read Cook's voyages, because they appear more national, but who has read Flinders, King, or Stokes? Is it because these narratives are Australian and true that they are not worthy of attention?

Having well-nigh exhausted the list of the early explorers in Australia, it is necessary now to turn to a more modern school. I must admit that in the works of this second section, with a few exceptions, such stirring narratives as those of the older travellers cannot be found. Nevertheless, considerable interest must still attach to them, as they in reality carry on the burning torch which will not be consumed until by its light the whole of Australia stands revealed.

The modern explorers are of a different class, and perhaps of one not so high as their predecessors. By this remark I do not mean anything invidious, and if any of the moderns are correctly to be classed with the ancients, the Brothers Gregory must be spoken of next, as being the fittest to head a secondary list. Augustus Gregory was in the West Australian field of discovery in 1846. He was a great mechanical, as well as a geographical, discoverer, for to him we are indebted for our modern horses' pack-saddles in lieu of the dreadful old English sumpter horse furniture that went by that name; he also invented a new kind of compass known as Gregory's Patent, unequalled for steering on horseback, and through dense scrubs where an ordinary compass would be almost useless, while steering on camels in dense scrubs, on a given bearing, without a Gregory would be next to impossible; it would be far easier indeed, if not absolutely necessary, to walk and lead them, which has to be done in almost all camel countries.

In 1854 Austin made a lengthened journey to the east and northwards, from the old settled places of Western Australia, and in 1856 Augustus Gregory conducted the North Australian Expedition, fitted out under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society of London. Landing at Stokes's Treachery Bay, Gregory and his brother Frank explored Stokes's Victoria River to its sources, and found another watercourse, whose waters, running inland, somewhat revived the old theory of the inland sea. Upon tracing this river, which he named Sturt's Creek, after the father of Australian exploration, it was found to exhaust itself in a circular basin, which was named Termination Lake. Retracing the creek to where the depot was situated, the party travelled across a stretch of unknown country for some two hundred miles, and striking Leichhardt's Port Essington track on Leichhardt's Roper River, his route was followed too closely for hundreds of miles until civilisation was reached. My friend Baron von Mueller accompanied this expedition as botanist, naturalist, surgeon and physician.

Soon after his return from his northern expedition, Gregory was despatched in 1858 by the Government of New South Wales to search again for the lost explorer Leichhardt, who had then been missing ten years. This expedition resulted in little or nothing, as far as its main object was concerned, one or two trees, marked L, on the Barcoo and lower end of the Thompson, was all it discovered; but, geographically, it settled the question of the course of the Barcoo, or Mitchell's Victoria, which Gregory followed past Kennedy's farthest point, and traced until he found it identical with Sturt's Cooper's Creek. He described it as being of enormous width in times of flood, and two of Sturt's horses, abandoned since 1845, were seen but left uncaptured. Sturt's Strezletki Creek in South Australian territory was then followed. This peculiar watercourse branches out from the Cooper and runs in a south-south-west direction. It brought Gregory safely to the northern settlements of South Australia. The fruitless search for it, however, was one of the main causes of the death of Burke and Wills in 1861. This was Gregory's final attempt; he accepted the position of Surveyor-General of Queensland, and his labours as an explorer terminated. His journals are characterised by a brevity that is not the soul of wit, he appearing to grudge to others the information he had obtained at the expense of great endurance, hardihood, knowledge, and judgment. Gregory was probably the closest observer of all the explorers, except Mitchell, and an advanced geologist.

In 1858 a new aspirant for geographical honours appeared on the field in the person of John McDouall Stuart, of South Australia, who, as before mentioned, had formerly been a member of Captain Sturt's Central Australian expedition in 1843-5 as draftsman and surveyor. Stuart's object was to cross the continent, almost in its greatest width, from south to north; and this he eventually accomplished. After three attempts he finally reached the north coast in 1862, his rival Burke having been the first to do so. Stuart might have been first, but he seems to have under-valued his rival, and wasted time in returning and refitting when he might have performed the feat in two if not one journey; for he discovered a well-watered country the whole way, and his route is now mainly the South Australian Transcontinental Telegraph Line, though it must be remembered that Stuart had something like fifteen hundred miles of unknown country in front of him to explore, while Burke and Wills had scarcely six. Stuart also conducted some minor explorations before he undertook his greater one. He and McKinlay were South Australia's heroes, and are still venerated there accordingly. He died in England not long after the completion of his last expedition.

We now come to probably the most melancholy episode in the long history of Australian exploration, relating to the fate of Burke and Wills. The people and Government of the colony of Victoria determined to despatch an expedition to explore Central Australia, from Sturt's Eyre's Creek to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria at the mouth of the Albert River of Stokes's, a distance in a straight line of not more than six hundred miles; and as everything that Victoria undertakes must always be on the grandest scale, so was this. One colonist gave £1000; £4000 more was subscribed, and then the Government took the matter in hand to fit out the Victorian Exploring Expedition. Camels were specially imported from India, and everything was done to ensure success; when I say everything, I mean all but the principal thing—the leader was the wrong man. He knew nothing of bush life or bushmanship, navigation, or any art of travel. Robert O'Hara Burke was brave, no doubt, but so hopelessly ignorant of what he was undertaking, that it would have been the greatest wonder if he had returned alive to civilisation. He was accompanied by a young man named Wills as surveyor and