In

Thrift is unknown to the Australian. His life alternates between satiety and semi-starvation. In summer he goes naked, but in winter he wraps himself in kangaroo skins. A girdle of hair bound about his loins holds his dowak, as his digging-stick is called, and an apron of skins suspended from the girdle affords a protection from shrubs. His food consists largely of animals, which he devours alive, and includes lizards, snakes, the heads being rejected, frogs, white ants, larvæ and moths. Other animals are roasted, showing that the Australian knows, contrary to an opinion that once prevailed, the method of kindling a fire. seasons of dearth, when there is a paucity of food-material, cannibalism is general. He then makes an attack upon a neighboring tribe who is his enemy, and if he cannot obtain food in this manner, he scruples not to fall back upon his wife and his children. One obligation of the wife is to keep her husband supplied with vegetable food, such as the roots of the wild yam, seeds of the acacia, sophoræ, leaves of the grass-tree, etc. Failing to produce a sufficiency, she is liberally treated with maulings and spearings, so that a wife generally appears bruised and gashed all over her body.

Among the different tribes of Australians, the boomerang is the principal weapon. This is a flat stick, three feet in length, and curves at the centre. It is thrown into the air among birds, jerks in a zigzag, spiral or circular fashion, and when thrown by a person skilled in its use is sure to bring down a few individuals at every throwing. Besides this weapon they have the throwing-stick, flint-pointed spears, shields, stone-hatchets, digging-sticks, netting-needles, nets of sinews, fibres or hairs, water-skins and canoes.

No government exists among this people outside that of the family, and no laws except certain traditionary rules about property, As for their religion, they have little save their terror of ghosts and demons, and certain superstitious traditional rites applicable to epochs in a man's life, but more especially so at the time of his burial. At ten years of age, a boy

is covered with blood; at ten to fourteen, he is circumcised in the north and south of Australia, but not in the west or on the Murray River; and at twenty, he is tattooed or scarred. Felicity after death is the reward of proper burial, but a man dying in battle or rotting in a field becomes an evil genius.

No more perfect example of tribal organization exists than that of the tribes of Australasia. In a very large proportion of existing tribes, the tribe is an aggregate of several stocks or distinct bodies of kindred, the persons composing the tribes being included in stocks which are, or are accounted, distinct from each other. Two tribal customs, namely, the prohibition of marriage between persons of the same stock, and the reckoning of kinship through females only, so that children are accounted of the stock of their mother, sustain this organization. Persons of the same stock, too, owe duties to each other, and are to some extent participants in each other's liabilities. An injury done by a man is an injury done by his stock, which may be avenged upon any member thereof; or an injury done to a man is an injury done by his stock, for which every member of it is bound to seek vengeance. As a consequence of these customs, a husband must be of a different stock from his wife or wives, and therefore must be accounted of a different stock from his children; and if he has wives of different stocks, then their respective children are accounted of different stocks. More than one stock, it will thus be perceived, is represented in every household. And since a man owes duties to his stock-the duties of acknowledged blood-relationship-while to those of his family who are not of his stock, there being nothing but the accident of birth to unite him, it necessarily follows that the family among these tribes has very little cohesion.

Wholly sensuous is the language of the Australian, their abstraction tending only in the way of arithmetic as far as the number five, and that itself being quite an unusual stretch. Polysyllabic as it is in formation, and having the accent on the penultimate, it is not at all inharmonious.

Though it comprehends many divergent forms, yet they seem to be all fundamentally connected, constituting a group entirely isolated from any of the linguistic families of the other parts of the world. Within its narrow confines the language is well developed and sensuously copious and expressive.

Like almost all other savages, the native Australians are rapidly disappearing before the spread of civilization. The European settlers crowd them out of all the more fertile and habitable lands, pressing them more and more into the desert of the interior, where they find it exceedingly hard to obtain in their roving, unsettled lives the necessary means of subsistence. Great numbers are thus forced to succumb to deprivations not of their own bringing, and not a few to the diseases and vices brought among them by the new possessors of their domains. The lowest estimate of their number, prior to the settlement of Europeans among them, gives over 150,000, but the natives still surviving scarcely figure one-half of that population. It is only a question of a decade or two when the Australian, like the Tasmanian, who was once his near neighbor, will have vanished from off the face of the country, leaving behind him his implements of war and the chase, his culinary and domestic apparatus, and the rude carvings of his hands in caves and in rocks, as the principal evidences of his earthly existence.

By competent critics the Australian is pronounced to be the most degraded of human beings, and the lowest type of man. In reason, love, generosity, conscience and mere responsibility he is the inferior of many of the lower animals, and in the erection of a house for comfort, shelter and security he is surpassed by creatures even as low in the scale as the worms and insects. It is true, when hunger has to be met, that he has shown some skill in the manufacture of implements necessary to the obtainment of his food, and also in resisting the attacks of his own kind and of the natural enemies by which he is surrounded. There is no doubt

that he is well satisfied with his condition in life, and could hardly be induced to exchange it for another. He has doubtless fulfilled the purpose of his being in the world, and unable to cope in the struggle for existence with a superior civilization must succumb to the latter which is better fitted to endure, a sad but impressive lesson which is the teaching of every chapter of the world's geologic story.

LIVING SOULS.

Α'

LL things were made by the Word of God. In this Word was life, spirit or energy. Without it was not anything made that was made. Hence, says Elihu, "the Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life," or, as Moses testifies, "the Lord God formed man, the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and man became a LIVING SOUL.

Now, if it be asked what the Scriptures define a living soul to be, the answer is a living natural, or animal body, whether of beasts, birds, fish or men. The phrase living creature is the exact synonyme of living soul. The words nephesh chayiah are in Hebrew the signs of the ideas expressed by Moses, nephesh signifying creature, life, soul, or breathing frame from the verb breathe, and chayiah, a noun from the verb to live, of life. Nephesh chayiah is the genus which includes all species of living creatures. In the common version of the Scriptures, it is rendered living soul, and, therefore, under this form of expression they speak of all flesh which breathes in air, earth and sea.

From the evidence adduced a man then is merely a body of life in the sense of his being an animal or living creature-nephesh chayiah adam. Therefore, as a natural man, he has no preeminence over the creatures God has made. Moses makes no distinction between him and them, for he calls them all living souls, breathing the breath of lives. His language, literally rendered, says, " and God said, the waters shall produce abundantly sheretz chayiah nephesh the reptile living soul;" and again, “kal nephesh chayiah erameshat every