MIDWIFERY. 127 



of the soil, from having no natural productions 

 worthy of cultivation.* 



The following is the practice of midwifery, as 

 I observed it among the native tribes, more 

 particularly those inhabiting the Yas, Murrum- 

 bidgee, and Tumat countries. 



When a female is in labour she leaves the 

 camp alone, and, should any assistance be re- 

 quired, she calls another female to her. When 

 the child is born, the afterbirth, or placenta, is 

 separated from the navel-string, or umbilical 

 cord, by scraping or rudely cutting it with a 

 shell, and the cord is left pending to some 



* Those philanthropic individuals who think to change the 

 habits of these savage tribes, expecting those who have lived 

 from the earliest period of their existence on the produce of 

 the chase, to abandon their wandering life, and settle down 

 to cultivate the soil — an employment to which they are quite 

 unaccustomed — can never have reflected how difficult, even 

 in our boasted civilized state, it is to change habits acquired 

 in early childhood. " Men," observes Hartley, in his Essays 

 on Man, (page 190,) " are brought to any thing almost sooner 

 than to change their habit of life, especially when the change 

 is either inconvenient or made against the force of natural 

 inclination, or with the loss of accustomed indulgences. It 

 is," he continues, " the most difficult of all things to convert 

 men from vicious habits to virtuous ones, as every one may 

 judge from what he feels in himself as well as from what he 

 sees in others." " It is almost," says Paley, after making 

 the above quotation in his Evidences of Christianity, " like 

 making men over again." 



