uttered loud cries. The heart, liver, and entrails were divided among the warriors, who carried away with them pieces stuck on their bone-pointed spears; while the upper part of the thigh (apparently the tit-bit) was roasted and eaten by the parents themselves! The skin, the skull, and the bones were, on the other hand, carefully packed up and taken away with them in their grass sacks. It is not unusual for a mother to devour her own child, that she may thereby regain the strength which the fruit of her womb has abstracted from her! When a warrior of a hostile tribe falls into their hands they celebrate his sacrifice with savage glee, by rubbing their bodies with the fat around their victim's kidneys, by which means they believe they strengthen their muscles and inspire their hearts with courage. In the southern parts

of Australia the natives use human skulls as drinking cups, and one instance is on record where a portion of a human skeleton was habitually used by an entire race as a tool. Each woman has one of these bone calabashes, which she usually has hollowed-out and manufactured herself. In the tolerably comprehensive ethnographic collection of the Australian Museum we saw several examples of these hideous drinking vessels! With respect to the idea of a future life, or the immortality of the soul, the natives seem to have very contracted notions, principally confined to a superstitious dread of evil spirits, and to the very singular notion that after death they are converted into whites, and that the Englishmen who now people their hunting grounds are the spirits of their ancestors thus transformed!

At various parts of the colony, especially among the outlying mountains and bare rocks adjoining Middle Harbour, Camp Cove, Point Piper, Mossman's Cove, Lang's Cove, &c., the eye is attracted by numbers of rude sculptures hewn in the stone, which usually represent terrestrial objects, such as kangaroos, emus, flying-squirrels, fish, tortoises, and, above all, numerous representations of natives performing the Coróborry. This is a sort of war-dance, in which those who participate usually paint their bodies with white lines, like a skeleton, and seen through the obscurity of night, leaping around a faint fire, have the appearance of a set of dead bodies dancing.

If we ask any of the black men of the present generation

the significance of these rock sculptures, they usually reply, in their broken English, "Black fellow make 'em long time ago," and on being pressed more particularly as to their age, they throw up their hands and faces, shut their eyes, and say, "Murrey, murrey, murrey, long time ago!"

The great variety of theories commonly received as to the supposed origin of this singular race of men have done little to dispel the obscurity which prevails as to the real stirps of which the Australian race is a branch. Writers who are fond of squaring facts with pre-conceived theories maintain that the first inhabitants of Australia came from Eastern Asia or the Indian Archipelago, and passing Torres Straits gradually overspread the entire Australian continent. Nay, some even go so far as to maintain that there exists to this time in the interior of some of the islands of the Malay Archipelago a race of men identical with the aborigines of Australia. And it certainly is a remarkable fact, that most of the Australian war-songs, dances, &c., have been diffused from north to south, although it does seem venturesome to deduce from this single circumstance a migration from Eastern Asia. Others again hold (such, namely, as Prichard, Wappaus, Burdach, &c.), that the aborigines are of the same race as that inhabiting New Guinea and New Caledonia, and thus make them of the same stock as the Australasian negro. Lastly, a modern naturalist, Mr. James Brown, who lived sixteen years amongst the blacks, considers it not improbable that some Malay crews (for since time immemorial it is known that

the Malays have been acquainted with, and visited the northern shores of, Australia) had been, by shipwreck or some similar calamity, cast away on the coast of the mainland, or on some of the islands near Torres Straits, and had thus become the first involuntary settlers of the north of Australia. This increasing population gradually spread over the interior, and when after some centuries this people had traversed the continent and arrived at the ocean on its further side, they had already lost all recollection of their Pelagic origin, and were no longer capable of deriving any advantage from the sea spread before their astonished gaze. Strange to say, the black populations of Australia seem to be the sole savage race inhabiting the coast of an ocean, who possess no means of transport by water, and are unable to swim! Very possibly the recent expeditions into the interior, undertaken with such ardour and attention to details, may throw some new light upon these aborigines, but equally, if not more, probable is it, that the entire race may have disappeared from the earth before any reliable facts can be ascertained respecting their origin, their migrations, or their history.

The morning after our arrival at Wulongong, and our first acquaintance with the natives, we made an excursion, under the tutelage of Mr. White, to Balgonie Farm, to hunt kangaroo in the forests of the neighbourhood. It was not, however, the large species (Macropus Major) we were to hunt, which sometimes attains a height of six feet, or even more, but a smaller kind known as the Wallaby (Halmaturus ualabatus).

The kangaroo proper have long since retreated before civilization, and are now only found in the recesses of the forest, hundreds of miles inland. The various participators in the hunt were posted at certain distances in one of the splendid forests, stretching between the Bellambi-Keira and Kemla ranges of hills, while the blacks who accompanied us set forth to drive the game towards us, assisted by their Dingoes, a kind of dog usually supposed to be originally of European race. The blacks use the term "Dingo" promiscuously for every description of dog, whereas the regular wild dog, or rather the dog that runs wild in Australia, is called in the native tongue "Warrigul," and is of no particular breed, but seems rather a mongrel descendant of the sheep dog.

The hunt was not very successful, and of some ten or twelve started by the "beaters," only two were killed. Although one can discern the Wallaby at some distance by its plashing tramp, so that it seems but to need a glance of the eye to bring it down as it flies past on its hind legs, followed close by the dogs, it yet needs great activity and precision of aim to hit the nimble animal as it hops swiftly past.

Yet though we were rewarded with such poor sport, our stay among the splendid woods of the Keira range sufficiently repaid us. The most varied and luxuriant forms of vegetation, changing at every step, almost transcend the wanderer's power of description by their marvellous and enrapturing beauty. Some portions of the forest landscape, where splendid

tree-ferns and gigantic gum trees, enveloped in the folds of the Liana, from which in its turn depended exquisite parasitic plants, reminded us of the brilliant profusion of the tropics. Not less peculiar and uncommon than the vegetation were the sounds that struck our ear from amid the semi-obscure green covert, without our eyes being able to distinguish the singers. And so deceptive are some of these, that one almost involuntarily starts as the loud crack resounds close to his ear of the Phsophodes crepitans, known to colonists as the "Coachman's whip," or the Myzantha Garrula, or bell-bird, sounds its bell-like note.

During our stroll