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y the same race, and had the same leading features and customs, as far as the latter could be observed. The sunken eye and overhanging eyebrow, the high cheek-bone and thick lip, distended nostrils, the nose either short or acquiline, together with a stout bust and slender extremities, and both curled and smooth hair, marked the natives of the Morumbidgee as well as those of the Darling. They were evidently sprung from one common stock, the savage and scattered inhabitants of a rude and inhospitable land. In customs they differed in no material point from the coast natives, and still less from the tribes on the Darling and the Castlereagh. They extract the front tooth, lacerate their bodies, to raise the flesh, cicatrices being their chief ornament; procure food by the same means, paint in the same manner, and use the same weapons, as far as the productions of the country will allow them. But as the grass-tree is not found westward of the mountains, they make a light spear of a reed, similar to that of which the natives of the southern islands form their arrows. These they use for distant combat, and not 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 br
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