Spencer's Gulf. For such an expedition, men of science and courage ought
to be selected. They ought to be provided with all sorts of implements
and stores, and with different animals, from the powers and instincts of
which they may derive assistance. They should have oxen from Buenos
Ayres, or from the English settlements, mules from Senegal, and
dromedaries from Africa or Arabia. The oxen would traverse the woods and
the thickets; the mules would walk securely among rugged rocks and hilly
countries; the dromedaries would cross the sandy deserts. Thus the
expedition would be prepared for any kind of territory that the interior
might present. Dogs also should be taken to raise game, and to discover
springs of water; and it has even been proposed to take pigs, for the
sake of finding out esculent roots in the soil. When no kangaroos and
game are to be found the party would subsist on the flesh of their own
flocks. They should be provided with a balloon for spying at a distance
any serious obstacle to their progress in particular directions, and for
extending the range of observations which the eye would take of such
level lands as are too wide to allow any heights beyond them to come
within the compass of their view. The journey might be allowed a year or
eighteen months, which would be only at the rate of four or five miles
per day. . . . The author of the present work" ("Universal Geography")
"has discoursed this project in conversation with the enlightened and
indefatigable traveller, M. Peron, who saw no insuperable obstacle to its
probability, except the existence of an immense ocean of sand occupying
the whole of the interior of the continent, which to him appeared
extremely probable."]

But Flinders was never fated to see the interior of Terra Australis,
either from the deck of a ship, or from any point of vantage; he surveyed
its shores, suggested the name it now bears--Australia, and left the work
of discovery, not even to this day quite completed, to other hands. But