Page:Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, volume 2.djvu/150

 two miles and a half per hour, with a medium width from bank to bank of from three to four hundred feet. This 'new river,' which was called the Murray, and into which the diminished waters of the Morrumbidgee fall, is evidently formed by a junction of the 'Hume' and 'Ovens,'—which streams, taking their rise in the great Wanagong Chain, were first made known to us by the travellers Messrs. Hovell and Hume, who crossed them, two hundred and fifty statute miles nearer their sources, in their excursion to Port Philip in 1824. Pursuing the course of the Murray, on the 14th January, the voyagers made 'rapid progress to the W.N.W.,' noticing, as they passed on, a low 'unbroken and uninteresting country of equal sameness of features and vegetation,' to that observed whilst descending the intricate Morrumbidgee on quitting their depot.

.After nine days voyage down the Murray, in which period they made about one hundred miles of westing, without observing the slightest change of country for the better, or the least rise in its surface, the expedition passed the mouth of a stream flowing from the north by east, with a strong current, and in point of magnitude but 'little inferior' to the Murray itself. Ascending it, Captain Sturt found it preserved a breadth of one hundred yards, and its banks, on which were many natives, 'were overhung with trees of finer and larger growth' than those of the Murray. Its waters were, moreover, ascertained to be two fathoms in depth; of turbid appearance, but 'perfectly sweet to the taste.' The confluence of these two rivers takes place, it appears, (by Captain Sturt's reckoning,) in exactly longitude 141° east, and immediately to the south of the parallel of 34°. It was at this stage of the expedition that the face of the country begun to assume (comparatively speaking) an interesting appearance; and the first rise of ground which had been seen in the advance of the party to the westward in a direct line of more than two hundred miles, was observed at a moderate distance from the river to the north-west. Previous to his reaching the point of confluence of the two rivers, Captain Sturt, it would appear, had entertained a doubt as to the ' decline of the vast plain through which the Murray flows,' as well as of ' the probable fall of the waters of the interior' to the north of it; but on observing a new stream flowing into the Murray, the circumstance of the 'parallel' (meridian doubtless) in which he had struck it, 'and the direction from which it came,' combined to satisfy him, 'that it could be no other than the Darling.' It was therefore concluded that the whole of the internally formed streams, at present known in that country, from my Dumaresq's River, (discovered in 1827 in lat. 29°,) to the Murray in 34°, are discharged into the ocean on the south-coast—the dip of the continent within the parallels of 28° and 35½° being of course to that