ally indolent. They still retain a taste for
their original wild habits, taking to the bush, occasionally, for several
days together; and in order to enjoy all the freedom of limb to which
they had been accustomed, throwing off their European clothing. This
practice has been expressly prohibited, as from the sudden resumption of
savage habits, and the abandonment of the covering to which they had
become accustomed, severe illness resulted. To this may in part be
attributable the rapid mortality which exists among them, and which leads
us to suppose that at no distant period their utter extinction must take
place. Out of two hundred who were originally taken to Flinders Island,
more than one hundred and fifty had perished in 1842, to replace which
loss, an addition of only fourteen by births, besides seven brought in
the Vansittart, had been made. It seems, in truth, impossible that a race
transported from their country, suddenly compelled to change all their
habits and modes of life, kept under restraint, however mild and
paternal, obliged to repress all the powerful instincts which lead them
to desire a renewal of their wild and unfettered life, tormented by the
memory of the freedom they once enjoyed, and galled by the moral chain
which they now wear, constantly sighing in secret for the perilous charms
of the wilderness, for their hunts, and their corrobberies, for the hills
and mountains and streams of their native land--it is impossible, I say,
that a people whose life has undergone such a change, who cherish such
reminiscences and such regrets, should increase and multiply and
replenish the face of the land.

TREATMENT OF NATIVES.

Their destiny is accomplished. In obedience to a necessity--of man's
creating certainly, but still a necessity--they have been expatriated for
their own preservation; to restore them, would be but to ensure their
speedier destruction; and all we can do is to soothe their declining
years, to provide that they shall advance gently, surrounded by all the
comforts of civilization, and by all the consolations of religion, to
their inevitable doom; and to draw a great lesson from their melancholy
history, namely, that we should not leave, until it is too late, the
aborigines of the countries we colonize exposed to the dangers of an
unregulated intercourse with the whites; that, without giving them any
undue preference, without falling into the dangerous extreme of
favouritism--an error of wh