To add to their natural deformity, they thrust a bone through the cartilage of the nose, and stick with gum to their hair, matted with moss, the teeth of men, sharks, or kangaroos, the tails of dogs, jaw bones of fish, &c. and daub their faces and bodies . s with red and white clay, and scarify the skin in every • part with sharp shells. The women and ferdale chil dren are generally found to want the first two joints of the little finger of the left hand ; and the reason they assign is, that they would otherwise be in the way of winding the fishing-lines over the hand.
They have no fixed habitations, the climate gene rally allowing of their sleeping in the open air, in the crevices of rocks, or under the shelter of the bushes. Their temporary hovels consist of the bark of a tree, each hovel just large enough to receive a single person ; to the northward, on the east coast, some were discovered a little larger, so that a family might, on an emergency, squeeze under one of them ; but they are without furniture or convenien ces of any description. They seem to have no idea of the benefits arising from social life ; their largest clans extend not beyond the family circle, of each of which the eldest is called by a name synonymous with that of father. They are totally without reli gion, neither paying the least respect or adoration to any object or being, real or imaginary. Hence they have nothing to prompt them to a good action, • nothing to deter them from a bad one ; hence mur der is not considered as any heinous crime, and wo men think nothing of destroying, by compression, the infant in the womb, to avoid the trouble, if brought alive into the world, of carrying it about and finding it subsistence. Should a woman die with an infant at the breast,' the living child is inhumanly thrown into the same hole with the mother, and covered with stones, of which the brutal father throws the first. They are savage even in love, the very first act of courtship, on the part of the hus band, being that of knocking down his intended bride with a club, and dragging her away from her - friends, bleeding and senseless, to the woods ; the consequence is, that scarcely a female of the age of maturity is to be seen without her head full of scars, the unequivocal marks of her husband's affection. The nearest relations are also perpetually destroying each other, either by stratagem or open combat ; for, savage as they are, they have a singular custom of expiating an offence, even murder, by the criminal exposing himself to as many of the injured family as may choose to stand forth and hurl their spears at him. From the moment that he is so dreadfully mangled that he can stand no longer, or has the good fortune to parry all their shafts, a reconcilement takes place, and friendship is restored ; if the crimi nal refuses to stand this trial, he and all his family are considered as fair game to attack and murder wherever they are met with. The English used to
attend these unequal combats, and thus gave coun tenance to a savage practice, which not unfrequent ly ended in the death of the person who was put on his defence. (See Collins, Flinders, Turnbull, &c.) If no very essential difference be perceptible in and physical -qualities of the man of New Holland, and the -rest of the species, except that which arises from the different circumstances under which they are placed;—if the rocks and mountains, and the earths, resemble nearly the inorganic sub stances that are met with in other parts of the world, there is at least a very extraordinary, and a diitinct A characteristic difference in both the animal and ye getable part of the creation, which makes a consi.. derable class of subjects in both these kingdoms pe culiar to New Holland. The quadrupeds hitherto dis covered, with very few exceptions, are of the kanga roo or opossum tribe ; having their hinder legs long out of all proportion, when compared with the length of the fore legs, and a sack under the belly of the female for the reception of the young, of which fa mily, though divided into different genera, there are at least fifty distinct species. They have rats, and dogs of the jackall kind, all exactly alike, and a little animal of the bear tribe named womat, and these pretty nearly complete the catalogue of four-footed animals yet known on this fifth Continent. There appears, indeed, such an apparent affinity of the natural objects in New South Wales, that Dr White observes, all the quadrupeds are like opos sums, all the fish like sharks, and that every part of the land. all the trees, and all the grasses, resemble one another. There is, however, an animal which resembles nothing in the creation but itself,—which, being rejected naturalists from the classes main malia, eves, and pieces, must, we suppose, be consi dered as belonging to the amphibia,—we mean the Or nithoryncus paradoxus, " a quadruped with the beak of a bird, which is contrary to known 'facts and re ceived opinions." When the head of one of these beasts was brought to the late Dr Shaw, of the British Museum he suspected it as an idle attempt to impose on his judgment, and did not hastily be Here that nature had set the bill of a duck on the head of a quadruped ; but so it has since proved to be the case.