may be inferred from various remarks in his paper.  He naively tells a story about a native who killed an opossum, and after eating the meat, threw the intestines to his wife.  “Ten years before that,” he adds, “that same man would have treated his wife as himself.”  Yet we have just seen that all the explorers, in all parts of the country, found that the natives who had never seen a white man treated their women like slaves and dogs.

ABORIGINAL HORRORS

If the savage learned his wantonness from the whites, did he get all his other vicious habits from the same source?  We know on the best authorities that the disgusting practice of cannibalism prevailed extensively among the natives.  “They eat the young men when they die, and the young women if they are fat” (Curr, III., 147).  Lumholtz entitled his book on Australia Among Cannibals.  The Rev. G. Taplin says (XV.): 

“Among the Dieyerie tribe cannibalism is the universal practice, and all who die are indiscriminately devoured ... the mother eats the flesh of her children, and the children that of their mother,” etc.

“If a man had a fat wife,” says the same writer (2), “he was always particularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might be seized by prowling cannibals.”  Among the wilder tribes few women are allowed to die a natural death, “they being generally despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food may not be lost."[154] Would the “fearless” Stephens say that the natives learned these practices from the whites?  Would he say they learned from the whites the “universal custom ... to slay every unprotected male stranger met with” (Curr, I., 133)?

“Infanticide is very common, and appears to be practised solely to get rid of the trouble of rearing children,” wrote Eyre (II., 324).  Curr (I., 70) heard that “some tribes within the area of the Central Division cut off the nipples of the females’ breasts, in some instances, for the purpose of rendering their rearing of children impossible.”  On the Mitchell River, “children were killed for the most trivial offences, such as for accidentally breaking a weapon as they trotted about the camp” (Curr, II., 403).  Twins are destroyed in South Australia, says Leigh (159), and if the mother dies “they throw the living infant into the grave, while infanticide is an every-day occurrence.”  Curr (I., 70) believes that the average number of children borne by each woman was six, the maximum ten; but of all these only two boys and one girl as a rule were kept, “the rest were destroyed immediately after birth,” as we destroy litters of puppies.  Sometimes the infants were smothered over a fire (Waitz, VI., 779), and deformed children were always killed.  Taplin (13) writes that before his colony was established among them infanticide was very prevalent among the natives.  “One intelligent woman said she thought that if the Europeans had waited a few more years they would have found the country without inhabitants.”  Strangulation, a blow of the waddy, or filling the ears with red-hot embers, were the favorite ways of killing their own babies.