is not found westward of the mountains, they make a light spear of a reed, similar to that of which the natives of the southern islands form their arrows.  These they use for distant combat, and not only carry in numbers, but throw with the boomerang to a great distance and with unerring precision, making them to all intents and purposes as efficient as the bow and arrow.  They have a ponderous spear for close fight, and others of different sizes for the chase.  With regard to their laws, I believe they are universally the same all over the known parts of New South Wales.  The old men have alone the privilege of eating the emu; and so submissive are the young men to this regulation, that if, from absolute hunger or under other pressing circumstances, one of them breaks through it, either during a hunting excursion, or whilst absent from his tribe, he returns under a feeling of conscious guilt, and by his manner betrays his guilt, sitting apart from the men, and confessing his misdemeanour to the chief at the first interrogation, upon which he is obliged to undergo a slight punishment.  This evidently is a law of policy and necessity, for if the emus were allowed to be indiscriminately slaughtered, they would soon become extinct.  Civilised nations may learn a wholesome lesson even from savages, as in this instance of their forebearance.  For somewhat similar reasons, perhaps, married people alone are here permitted to eat ducks.  They hold their corrobories, (midnight ceremonies), and sing the same melancholy ditty that breaks the stillness of night on the shores of Jervis’ Bay, or on the banks of the Macquarie; and during the ceremony imitate the several birds and beasts with which they are acquainted.  If these inland tribes differ in anything from those on the coast, it is in the mode of burying their dead, and, partially, in their language.  Like all savages, they consider their women as secondary objects, oblige them to procure their own food, or throw to them over their shoulders the bones they have already picked, with a nonchalance that is extremely amusing; and, on the march, make them beasts of burden to carry their very weapons.  The population of the Morumbidgee, as far as we had descended it at this time, did not exceed from ninety to a hundred souls.  I am persuaded that disease and accidents consign many of them to a premature grave.

Mirage.

From this camp, one family only accompanied us.  We journeyed due west over plains of great extent.  The soil upon them was soft and yielding, in some places being a kind of light earth covered with rhagodiae, in others a red tenacious clay, overrun by the misembrianthemum and salsolae.  Nothing could exceed the apparent barrenness of these plains, or the cheerlessness of the landscape.  We had left all high lands behind us, and were now on an extensive plain, bounded in the distance by low trees or by dark lines of cypresses.  The lofty gum-trees on the river followed its windings,