Most of us have had moments of rapture before the glowing embodiment of the inspiration of some great artist, whose gifts have been developed to maturity by enthusiastic and patient striving for perfection.  Do not these clumsy drawings, too, reveal that which, considering their environment, is talent—­original and unacademic.  Here is the sheer beginning, the spontaneous germ of art, the labouring of a savage soul controlled by wilful aesthetic emotions.  For these pictures are not figurative, not mere signs and symbols capable of elucidation, but the earliest and only efforts of an illiterate race, a race in intellectual infancy, towards the ideal—­a forlorn but none the less sincere attempt to reach the “light that quickens dreams to deeds!”

The last of the series of “Black Art” pictures is not local.  It occurs on the reverse of a shield, the spear-punctured lower edge of which verifies its eventful history.  The warrior-artist silhouetted a sweetheart’s figure, where, at supreme moments, it came before his fancy and gave the battle to his hands.

A POISONOUS FOOD

One of the chief vegetable foods of the blacks is the fruit of “tinda-burra” (Moreton Bay chestnut—­CASTANOSPERMUM AUSTRALE).  The plentiful pea-shaped flowers range in colour from apple-green, pale yellow, orange to scarlet, and contain large quantities of nectar, which attracts multitudes of birds and insects.  Blacks regard this tree with special favour and consideration.  A casual remark, as I observed the industry of insects about the flowers, that the bean-tree was good for bees, elicited the scornful response, “Good for man!” The tree is of graceful shape, the bole often pillar-like in its symmetry, and the wood hard and durable and of pleasing colour, and so beautifully grained that it is fast becoming popular for furniture and cabinet-making.  It bears a prolific crop of large beans, from two to five in each of its squat pods, but they are, as Mr Standfast found the waters of Jordan, “to the palate bitter, and to the stomach cold,” and require special treatment in order to eliminate a poisonous principle.  Many chemists analysed the beans (one finding that they may be converted into excellent starch) without discovering any noxious element; but as horses, cattle, and pigs die if they eat the raw bean, and a mere fragment is sufficient to give human beings great pain, followed by most unpleasant consequences, the research was continued, until within quite a recent date the presence of saponin was detected.  Before science made its discovery, the blacks were very positive on the point of the poisonous qualities of the bean, and took measures to eliminate it.  In some parts of the State the beans, after being steeped in water for several days, are dried in the sun, roasted in hot ashes, and pounded between stones into a coarse kind of meal, which may be kept for an indefinite period.  When required