312 Life and Immortahty. 
Thrift is unknown to the Australian. His life alternates 
between satiety and semi-starvation. In summer he goes 
naked, but in winter he wraps himself in kangaroo skins. 
A girdle of hair bound about his loins holds his dowak, as 
his digging-stick is called, and an apron of skins suspended 
from the girdle affords a protection from shrubs, His food 
consists largely of animals, which he devours alive, and 
includes lizards, snakes, the heads being rejected, frogs, 
white ants, larve and moths. Other animals are roasted, 
showing that the Australian knows, contrary to an opinion 
that once prevailed, the method of kindling a fire. In 
seasons of dearth, when there is a paucity of food-material, 
cannibalism is general. He then makes an attack upon a 
neighboring tribe who is his enemy, and if he cannot obtain 
food in this manner, he scruples not to fall back upon his 
wife and his children. One obligation of the wife is to keep 
her husband supplied with vegetable food, such as the roots 
of the wild yam, seeds of the acacia, sophore, leaves of the 
grass-tree, etc. Failing to produce a sufficiency, she is lib- 
erally treated with maulings and spearings, so that a wife 
generally appears bruised and gashed all over her body. 
Among the different tribes of Australians, the boomerang 
is the principal weapon. This is a flat stick, three feet in 
length, and curves at the centre. It is thrown into the air 
among birds, jerks in a zigzag, spiral or circular fashion, and 
when thrown by a person skilled in its use is sure to bring 
down a few individuals at every throwing. Besides this 
weapon they have the throwing-stick, flint-pointed spears, 
shields, stone-hatchets, digging-sticks, netting-needles, nets 
of sinews, fibres or hairs, water-skins and canoes. 
No government exists among this people outside that of 
the family, and no laws except certain traditionary rules about 
property, As for their religion, they have little save their 
terror of ghosts and demons, and certain superstitious tradi- 
tional rites applicable to epochs in a man’s life, but more espe- 
cially so at the time of his burial. At ten years of age,a boy 
