jumps to the left, the second jumps to the right, the third to the left again, and so on; until the action acquires due intensity, when all simultaneously and suddenly stop.  The excitement which this dance produces in the savage is very remarkable.  However listless the individual may be, laying perhaps, as usual, half asleep; set him to this dance, and he is fired with sudden energy, and every nerve is strung to such a degree that he is no longer to be recognised as the same person until he ceases to dance, and comes to you again.  There can be little doubt that the corrobory is the medium through which the delights of poetry are enjoyed, in a limited degree, even by these primitive savages of New Holland.

(Footnote.  To this end they stretch a skin very tight over the knees, and thus may be said to use the tympanum in its rudest form, this being the only instance of a musical instrument that I have seen among them.  Burder says:  “By the timbrels which Miriam and the other women played upon when dancing, we are to understand the tympanum of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which instrument still bears in the East the name that it is in Hebrew, namely, doff or diff, whence is derived the Spanish adufe, the name of the Biscayan tabor.  Niebuhr describes this instrument in his Travels Part 1 page 181.  It is a broad hoop, with a skin stretched over it; on the edge there are generally thin round plates of metal, which also make some noise when this instrument is held up in one hand and struck with the fingers of the other hand.  Probably no musical instrument is so common in Turkey as this; for when the women dance in the harem the time is always beat on this instrument.  We find the same instrument on all the monuments in the hands of the Bacchante.  It is also common among the negroes of the Gold Coast and Slave Coast.”  Oriental Customs Volume 1.)

Visit to the limestone caves.

March 18.

As it was necessary to grind some wheat with hand-mills to make up our supply of flour, I was obliged to remain a day at Buree; and I therefore determined on a visit to the limestone caves, by no means the least remarkable feature in that country.  The whole district consists of trap and limestone, the former appearing in ridges, which belong to the lofty mass of Canobolas.  The limestone occurs chiefly in the sides of valleys in different places, and contains probably many unexplored caves.  The orifices are small fissures in the rock, and they have escaped the attention of the white people who have hitherto wandered there.  I had long been anxious to extend my researches for fossil bones among these caves, having discovered during a cursory visit to them some years before that many interesting remains of the early races of animals in Australia were to be found in the deep crevices and caverns of the limestone rock.  How they got there was a question which had often puzzled me; but having at length arrived at some conclusions on the subject, I was now desirous to ascertain, by a more extensive examination of the limestone country, whether the caves containing the osseous breccia presented here similar characteristics to those I had observed in Wellington Valley.