70 December 1853 Port Jackson N.S.W. 27th This day was spent in the city of Sydney, which I found to be a large place of 60.000 inhabitants, and having fine buildings, - the private residences even, being built of sandstone. Through the kindness of Mr Sked, one of the clerks of Mr Clark, the American Consul, I visited the shop of Mr Wilcox, Natural History dealer, whom I found to be a man of information, and I spent several hours very agreeably in examining the curious forms of Mammalia and birds peculiar to Australia, of which Mr W. had a very full collection. He also show me a number of species of oceanic birds of the southern hemisphere, described by Gould and others, by which I find that the number of species is much greater in the Southern Ocean than I had been led to suppose from what I saw on the passage. The English ship Akbar, which ship we spoke on the 24th Nov. in 60° E. Lon. arrived here today, we having beat her by one day. 28th Today I went on a dredging excursion to the mouth of the harbor, with Mr Wil- 71 cox, in my little sheel iron boat the “Jolly Wog” we visited the celebrated Trigonoid locality, near the “Saw and Pigs”, and dredged, besides many living Trigonoids, some 30 or 40 more species of shells, very many crustaceans and a few Amelides. (See notes.) One of the most curious animals obtained was a marine leech, with actions precisely like those of the common fresh water leeches from which it differed in its small size and the hardness of its pappillated skin. This forie, however, escaped. The bottom at the locality was a clean Shelly Sand, - the depth about three fathoms. 29th I spent this day in the city, examining Wilcox’ collection. That gentleman gave me some curious accounts of some naturalists whom I had long known by reputation, but did not dream of finding “in propria persona” in this part of the world. He informed me that Mac Leay, the originator of the Circular Theory of Classification in Natural History, was now residing at this place, and that Swainson who carried out that theory so fully in Zoology (see his works in Lardner’s Cyclopaedia) was now