316 SOME ACCOUNT OF NEW HOLLAND CH. xm 



increase them as long as luxuries can be invented and riches 

 found for the purchase of them. How soon these luxuries 

 degenerate into necessaries may be sufficiently evinced by 

 the universal use of strong liquors, tobacco, spices, tea, etc. 

 In this instance, again, Providence seems to act the part of 

 a leveller, doing much towards putting all ranks into an 

 equal state of wants, and consequently of real poverty : the 

 great and magnificent want as much, and maybe more, than 

 the middle classes : they again in proportion more than the 

 inferior, each rank looking higher than its station, but confin- 

 ing itself to a certain point above which it knows not how 

 to wish, not knowing at least perfectly what is there 

 enjoyed. 



Tools among these people we saw almost none, indeed, 

 having no arts which require any, it is not to be expected 

 that they should have many. A stone sharpened at the edge 

 and a wooden mallet were the only ones that we saw formed 

 by art : the use of these we supposed to be to make the 

 notches in the bark of high trees by which they climb them 

 for purposes unknown to us ; and for cutting and perhaps 

 driving in wedges to take off the bark which they must 

 have in large pieces for making canoes, shields, and water- 

 buckets, and also for covering their houses. Besides these 

 they use shells and corals to scrape the points of their 

 darts, and polish them with the leaves of a kind of wild 

 fig -tree (Ficus radula), which bites upon wood almost as 

 keenly as our European shave-grass, used by the joiners. 

 Their fish-hooks are very neatly made of shell, and some 

 are exceedingly small : their lines are also well twisted, and 

 they have them from the size of a half-inch rope to almost 

 the fineness of a hair, made of some vegetable. 



Of netting they seem to be quite ignorant, but make 

 their bags, the only thing of the kind we saw among them, 

 by laying the threads loop within loop, something like 

 knitting, only very coarse and open, in the very same 

 manner as I have seen ladies make purses in England. 

 That they had no sharp instruments among them we 

 ventured to guess from the circumstance of an old man 



