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MY LORD, The completion of this Work affords me the opportunity I have long desired of thanking your Lordship thus publicly, for the kindness with which you acceded to my request to be permitted to dedicate it to you. The encouragement your Lordship was pleased to give me has served to stimulate me in the prosecution of a task, which would, I fear, have been too great for me to have accomplished in my present condition, under any ordinary views of ambition. Indeed, labouring as I have been for m

When I first determined on committing to the press a detailed account of the two expeditions, which I conducted into the interior of the Australian continent, pursuant to the orders of Lieutenant General Darling, the late Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, it was simply with a view of laying their results before the geographical world, and of correcting the opinions that prevailed with regard to the unexplored country to the westward of the Blue Mountains. I did not feel myself equal eit

The year 1826 was remarkable for the commencement of one of those fearful droughts to which we have reason to believe the climate of New South Wales is periodically subject. It continued during the two following years with unabated severity. The surface of the earth became so parched up that minor vegetation ceased upon it. Culinary herbs were raised with difficulty, and crops failed even in the most favourable situations. Settlers drove their flocks and herds to distant tracts for pasture and w

To Charles Sturt, Esq. Captain in the 39th Regiment of Foot. Whereas it has been judged expedient to fit out an expedition for the purpose of exploring the interior of New Holland, and the present dry season affords a reasonable prospect of an opportunity of ascertaining the nature and extent of the large marsh or marshes which stopped the progress of the late John Oxley Esq, Surveyor General, in following the courses of the rivers Lachlan and Macquarie in the years 1817 and 1818. And whereas I

The expedition of which we have just detailed the proceedings was so far satisfactory in its results, that it not only set at rest the hypothesis of the existence of an internal shoal sea in southern Australia, and ascertained the actual termination of the rivers it had been directed to trace, but also added very largely to our knowledge of the country considerably to the westward of former discoveries. And although no land had been traversed of a fertile description of sufficient extent to invi

Considering the nature of the country over which the first expedition travelled, it could hardly have been expected that its geological specimens would be numerous. It will appear, however, from the following list of rocks collected during the second expedition, that the geological formation of the mountains to the S.W. of Port Jackson is as various as that to the N.W. of it is mountainous. The specimens are described not according to their natural order, but in the succession in which they were