34 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



A chapter of great value to the anthropologist is that upon the plants used 

 by the natives of Mitchell and Fluiders Rivers for food, medicine, stupefying 

 fish, weapons, and manufactures, 104 species in all. Once in a while a report of 

 this kind is made, and it always arrests attention. Just about the time Sir John 

 Lubbock's discussions upon the amount of land necessary to support a savage 

 were becoming well known, our own Government-surveying parties began to 

 send to the National Museum specimens of all the foods used by our aborigines. 

 No one can look at the long rows of jars containing these foods without realiz- 

 ing that the great Enghshman left out a large factor in his problem. The same 

 fact appears from Mr. Palmer's lists. The Australians eat roots, bulbs, root- 

 stalks, stems, leaves, stalks of flowers, buds, skins of stems, fruits in endless 

 variety, and seeds. They eat some of them raw ; others roasted, steamed, or 

 macerated; and poisonous plants are subjected to a series of soaking, steeping, 

 mashing, roasting, grinding, and baking that completely destroys the noxious 

 quality and furnishes a wholesome food. Five of the plants named are used to 

 sicken fish. Those set down as medicines are used as veritable drugs and not as 

 sorcerer's charms. The list includes crushed leaves, bark, and flowers, soaked or 

 steeped, and applied externally for a poultice or bathing, or the water is drunk. 

 The Eucalyptus pruinosa bark is bruised and wound tightly around the chest, 

 being kept damp with water. Th,e patient also sits in a decoction of the plant. 

 The young black fellows rub their faces with Drosera indica to make their whisk- 

 ers grow. Eighteen plants are mentioned as furnishing material for cordage, 

 cloth, nets, boomerangs, reed spears, shields, etc. 



DR. SCHLIEMANN: HIS LIFE AND WORK. 



He has again visited the Troad; he has again hired laborers, and lived in 

 tents, and brought with him great experts, in order to clear up and verify what 

 remained obscure and doubtful in his former investigations. The main difficulty 

 in his mind was the apparent smallness of the early city which he found to have 

 been burned, and which seemed certainly the city which gave a basis and a 

 local habitation to the traditions embodied in the Iliad. The gold found there 

 implied considerable wealth ; all the legends pointed to the spot having once 

 been occupied by a powerful and civilized people, and yet there seemed no room 

 for them. His new book gives us the natural solution. He had mistaken the 

 acropolis of the " second city " for the whole of it. His architects proved to 

 them that there had been an extensive lower city around the " Pergama of 

 Priam," which was also burned in the great catastrophe, but was not resettled or 

 built on again. From that time small and obscure descendants occupied the 

 royal site, and left poor and shabby traces of their life. It was not till the suc- 

 cessors of Alexander enlarged and beautified the town, and the Romans, with 



