t only carry in numbers, but throw with the boomerang to a great
distance and with unerring precision, making them to all intents and
purposes as efficient as the bow and arrow. They have a ponderous spear
for close fight, and others of different sizes for the chase. With regard
to their laws, I believe they are universally the same all over the known
parts of New South Wales. The old men have alone the privilege of eating
the emu; and so submissive are the young men to this regulation, that if,
from absolute hunger or under other pressing circumstances, one of them
breaks through it, either during a hunting excursion, or whilst absent
from his tribe, he returns under a feeling of conscious guilt, and by his
manner betrays his guilt, sitting apart from the men, and confessing his
misdemeanour to the chief at the first interrogation, upon which he is
obliged to undergo a slight punishment. This evidently is a law of policy
and necessity, for if the emus were allowed to be indiscriminately
slaughtered, they would soon become extinct. Civilised nations may learn a
wholesome lesson even from savages, as in this instance of their
forebearance. For somewhat similar reasons, perhaps, married people alone
are here permitted to eat ducks. They hold their corrobories,
(midnight ceremonies), and sing the same melancholy ditty that breaks the
stillness of night on the shores of Jervis' Bay, or on the banks of the
Macquarie; and during the ceremony imitate the several birds and beasts
with which they are acquainted. If these inland tribes differ in anything
from those on the coast, it is in the mode of burying their dead, and,
partially, in their language. Like all savages, they consider their women
as secondary objects, oblige them to procure their own food, or throw to
them over their shoulders the bones they have already picked, with a
nonchalance that is extremely amusing; and, on the march, make them beasts
of burden to carry their very weapons. The population of the Morumbidgee,
as far as we had descended it at this time, did not exceed from ninety to
a hundred souls. I am persuaded that disease and accidents consign many of
them to a premature grave.

MIRAGE.

From this camp, one family only accompanied us. We journeyed due west over
plains of great extent. The soil upon them was soft and yielding, in some
places being a kind of light earth covered with rhagodiae, in others a
red tenacious clay, overrun by the misembrianthemu