250 MATHEWS—LANGUAGES OF NEW SOUTH WALES. [May 15, 
person qualified for the task shall take up this highly important 
subject, the languages and the customs of an interesting primitive 
people will be lost to science. 
The languages spoken by the native inhabitants of the New 
England district of New South Wales are quite different in vocabu- 
lary and intonation from those found in any other part of New 
South Wales which I have visited. Therefore I consider myself 
very fortunate in being the first author to report their grammatical 
structure. 
In the following pages I shall endeavor to record and preserve 
the elements of two aboriginal languages, with a vocabulary of one 
of them. All of the materials of the grammars, and also of the 
vocabulary, have been collected by me in the camps of the abo- 
rigines, and were noted down direct from the mouths of the native 
speakers, so that I can become entirely responsible for their 
accuracy. 
In common with other Australian languages reported by me, the 
Anéwan and Banbai tongues possess a double form of the first 
person of the dual and plural, in’ every part of speech subject to 
inflection, by means of which the person spoken to may be 
included or excluded. It may be stated here that I was the 
first author to give full details of this peculiarity in the languages 
of Australia,’ although it had been observed to a certain extent in 
some of the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and among the Amarinds 
of North America. These two languages likewise contain a dual 
and plural number in all parts of speech. 
It is hoped that these efforts of mine may prove of some value, 
by enabling philologists to compare the native tongues of Aus- 
tralian tribes, not only among themselves, but with other languages 
in the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and various parts of the 
Pacific Ocean, as well as with the speech of other primitive tribes 
in different parts of the world. 
The space at my disposal in the PROCEEDINGS of this Society 
render it necessary to describe only the leading elements of the 
languages dealt with. 
ORTHOGRAPHY. 
The system of orthoepy adopted is that which is recommended 
by the Royal Geographical Society of England, but a few addi- 
1« The Gundungurra Language,’”? Proc, AMER. PHIL. Soc., Vol. xl, p. 140. 
