duly credited with having conveyed the particulars.  Is it not obvious, however, that the news had been transmitted orally, and that the crude carvings on the stick merely indicated an attempt to give verisimilitude to the intelligence—­the wavy line indicating the creek, and the notch the fatal waterhole.  If not, then a black’s message-stick is a model of literary condensation, their characters marvels of comprehensiveness and exactitude.

Another letter is before me—­one of the best specimens with regard to workmanship I have ever seen.  Upon one edge of a piece of brown wood 6 inches long, 1 inch broad, flat and rounded off at the edges and ends, there are five notches, and on the opposite edge a single notch.  Close to the end is a faint, crude representation of a broad arrow, below which is a confusion of small cuts, in a variety of angles, none quite vertical, some quite horizontal.  On the reverse is a single—­almost perpendicular—­cut, and a bold X, and near the point, two shallow, indistinct diverging cuts.  So far no one to whom the letter has been submitted has given a satisfactory reading.  Blacks frankly admit that they do not understand it.  They examine it curiously, and almost invariably remark—­“Some fella mak’ em.”  No attempt to decipher it is undertaken, because no doubt it was never intended to be read.  Yet a plausible elucidation is at hand.  The single notch, let it be said, represents a black who wishes to let five white fellows (who have made inquiries in that direction) know that a corrobboree is to begin before sundown, the setting sun being represented by the broad arrow, which seems to dip over the end of the stick.  The guests are expected to bring rum to produce a bewildering, unsteady effect upon the whole camp—­none, big or little, but will stagger about in all directions and finally lie down.  On the other hand the guests are not to bring “one fella” policeman with handcuffs (the cross), otherwise all will decamp—­the two last are seen vanishing into space.  By a rare coincidence this very free interpretation could be made to apply to an actuality at the time the “letter” was received, but as a matter of fact it came from quite a different source to the black fellow who had engaged to let some students of the aboriginal character know when the next corrobboree would take place.  It still remains undecipherable.  My investigations do not support the theory that the blacks are capable of recording the simplest event by means of a system of so-called picture-writing, but rather that message-sticks have no meaning apart from verbal explanations.  Blacks profess to be able to send messages which another may understand, but the tests applied locally invariably break down.