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58 A NATUEALIST ON THE "CHALLENGER." 



flat stone. Both stones are merely selected, and not shaped in 

 any way. 



These Blacks seem never to have had any stone tomahawks, 

 and their spear-heads are of bone. They seem not to hunt the 

 Wallabies or climb after the Opossums, as do the more southern 

 Blacks, but to live almost entirely on creeping things and roots, 

 and on fish, which they spear with four-pronged spears. Staff- 

 Surgeon Crosbie of the " Challenger " saw Longway and his boy 

 smashing up logs of drift-wood and pulling out Teredos and eat- 

 ing them one by one as they reached them. 



I tested Longway and also several of the Blacks together at 

 the camp, by putting groups of objects, such as cartridges, before 

 them, but could not get them to count in their language above 

 three — piama, labaima, damma.* They used the word nurraf 

 also, apparently for all higher numbers. It was curious to 

 see their procedure when I put a heap of five or six objects 

 before them. They separated them into groups of two, or two 

 and one, and pointing to the heaps successively said, " labaima, 

 labaima, piama," " two," " two," " one." Though another of my 

 guides had been long with the Whites he had little idea of count- 

 ing. After he had picked up two dozen birds for me and seen 

 them packed away, I asked him how many there were in the 

 tin : he said Six. I wish I had paid more attention to the 

 language of these Gudangs. ISTo doubt amongst such people 

 language changes with remarkable rapidity ; especially as here, 

 where tribes are mixed, and some of the words at least seem 

 to have changed since MacGillivray's time. 



The Blacks are wonderfully forgetful, and seem never to carry 

 an idea long in their heads. One day when Longway was out 

 with me he kept constantly repeating to himself " two shilling/' 

 a sum I had promised him if I shot a Bifle-bird, and he constantly 

 reminded me of it, evidently with his thoughts full of the idea. 

 After the day was over, and we were near home, he suddenly 

 left me and disappeared, having been taken with a sudden desire 

 to smoke his bamboo, and gone by a short cut to the camp. 



* MacGillivray, "Gudang Dialect." He gives "epiamana elabaiu 

 ilama." 



t = uuora ? MacGillivray. 



