to me Australian customs as
being in force there which exhibit the same accordance with those I found
in the west; and I have myself ascertained their existence on several
other portions of the continent. But it is remarkable that, although so
many persons have described isolated customs of this people, no one has
yet taken the trouble to digest them into one mass, and to exhibit them
in the aggregate, so that an inference might be drawn as to how far the
state in which the natives of Australia are at present found is caused by
the institutions to which they are subjected.

We find then, in Australia, the remarkable fact that the inhabitants of a
tract of country nearly two thousand miles in breadth are governed by the
same institutions: and what renders this more singular is that the people
submitted to them are not subjected by written rules of faith, which the
chiefs of each race may interpret and modify according to their will; as
is the case with those who are governed by the Koran or other similar
codes; but in this instance mere oral traditions are handed down, which
teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed under certain
penalties, and without the aid of fixed records, or the intervention of a
succession of authorized depositaries and expounders these laws have been
transmitted from father to son through unknown generations, and are fixed
in the minds of the people as sacred and unalterable.

DEISTICAL REVERIES CONFUTED BY EXPERIENCE.

One common mode of argument among deistical writers is to imagine
barbarous man let loose upon the earth without undergoing any previous
preparation for the scene upon which he was about to enter; and they then
trace out how, urged on by his necessities and aided by his senses, he
successively discovered the natural productions necessary for his
subsistence and the arts which ministered to his wants, until step by
step he mounted to the pinnacle of civilization. But these are merely
reveries of the closet, dreams of the inexperienced, and have no real
foundation in as far at least as Australia is concerned. That the first
natives who were placed on that continent must have been instructed how
to provide for their wants, how to form weapons suited to their
circumstances, how to select roots, and to capture animals fitted for
food, has been demonstrated over and over again, but at no time more
forcibly than when the portion of my party, under Mr. Walker, were coming