(Footnote.  “We often read of people cutting themselves, in Holy Writ, when in great anguish; but we are not commonly told what part they wounded.  The modern Arabs, it seems, gash their arms which with them are often bare:  it appears from a passage of Jeremiah that the ancients wounded themselves in the same part, ’Every head shall be bald, and every beard clipt; upon all hands shall be cuttings and upon the loins sackcloth.’  Chapter 48:37.”  Harmer volume 4 page 436.)

AUTHORITY OF OLD MEN.

Respect for age is universal among the aborigines.  Old men, and even old women, exercise great authority among assembled tribes and “rule the big war” with their voices when both spears and boomerangs are ready to be thrown.* Young men are admitted into the order of the seniors according to certain rites which their coradjes, or priests, have the sagacity to keep secret and render mysterious.

(Footnote.  Leviticus 19:32.  “Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man.”  The Lacedemonians had a law that aged persons should be reverenced like fathers.  See also Homer Iliad 15:204 et 23:788.  Odyss. 13:141.)

LAW AGAINST EATING EMU FLESH.

No young men are allowed to eat the flesh or eggs of the emu, a kind of luxury which is thus reserved exclusively for the old men and the women.  I understood from Piper, who abstained from eating emu when food was very scarce, that the ceremony necessary in this case consisted chiefly in being rubbed all over with emu fat by an old man.  Richardson, one of our party, was an old man and Piper reluctantly allowed himself to be rubbed with emu fat by Richardson; but from that time he had no objection to eat the flesh of that bird.  The threatened penalty was that young men, after eating it, would be afflicted with sores all over the body.

NATIVE DOGS.

The native dog, so common in Australia, is not found in Tasmania; while on the other hand two animals, the Dasyurus ursinus and Thylacynus, exist in Tasmania but have not been found hitherto in Australia.  Have these been extirpated in Australia by the dog on his introduction subsequently to the opening of the straits?  It may be observed that this is the more likely as the above-mentioned species found in Van Diemen’s Land only, consist of those two unable to climb and avoid such an enemy.  The Australian natives evince great humanity in their behaviour to these dogs.  In the interior we saw few natives who were not followed by some of these animals, although they did not appear of much use to them.  The women not unfrequently suckle the young pups and so bring them up, but these are always miserably thin so that we knew a native’s dog from a wild one by the starved appearance of the former.  The howl of a native dog in the desert wilds is the most melancholy sound imaginable, much resembling that of a tame dog when he has lost his master.  We find no remains of this genus among the fossils and it seems therefore probable that the dog accompanied the native, wherever he came from.