316 - SOME ACCOUNT OF NEW HOLLAND cu. xu 
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, ete. 
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 
