Champion Bay district, to whom they have proved a most valuable means of extending their runs and increasing their flocks. Mr. Forrest discovered large surfaces of well-grassed land, and many pools and fresh water springs on the main source of the river. The Gascoigne and its affluent, the Lyons, form the connecting links between the rivers of the West and those of the North coasts, the head waters of the one interlocking with those of the Murchison, and of tine other with those of the Ashburton. The Lyons flows at the foot of the South face of Barlee Range, as the Ashburton does at the North of Capricorn Range, under the Southern tropic, the Spinifex district of the coastline extending to the Eastward between them.
The basin of the Upper Gascoigne is marked by lofty hills of erupted rock, trap, and basalt, as well as by schists and slates. It is rich in minerals, has many available arable and pastoral locations; it may present an irregular curved area of 200 miles in length by 60 in breadth. The Lyons joins the Gascoigne about 75 miles from the sea, at the base of the sandstones, which have here their escarpment on the North face of the Kennedy Range, through which the course of the river passes to the sea, in Sharks Bay. About the mouth there is much good pastoral land, which has been taken up and is in course of occupation. The mouth of the river covered by Babbage island forms a harbor accessible by the Southern channel to vessels drawing 14 feet. Sharks Bay will probably become the centre of the trade of the Upper Murchison, as well as of the Gascoigne; it is a vast sheet of water having a low Eastern coast of about 130 miles covered by mangrove flats on the South of the Gascoigne, and rising in the sandhills of Lyell's Range to the North, unbroken, save by the mouth of
