244 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERS. 



nor permanent habitations of any kind. Men and 

 women are alike naked, except that in the southern 

 parts of Australia, they wear a kind of rug of opos- 

 sum skins over the shoulders, during the cold 

 weather. They have no religious notions beyond a 

 feeling of vague superstition. Their languages, 

 although shewing evident traces of a common origin, 

 yet vary so much and so frequently, that a native of 

 one tribe can rarely understand the tongue of another 

 fifty miles distant. Even immediately adjacent tribes 

 often speak totally different languages, as different, 

 for instance, as the German and the Dutch, or the 

 Spanish and the Portuguese. 



In addition to these negative characteristics, in 

 which the Australians differ more or less from the 

 Papuans in intelligence, there are more positive dis- 

 tinctions between the two. They differ in those 

 things which they have invented, as well as in those 

 they have not. Among these, two things are most 



bark, tied at the ends, which Cook found in Botany Bay, and 

 which the natives still use in shallow coves for fishing. In the 

 same way, on the north coast, the canoes gradually deteriorate as 

 we proceed from Torres Strait to the westward. At Port Es- 

 sington sheets of bark only were known before the arrival of the 

 Macassar Bughis, and on the north-west coast, neither Captain 

 King nor Captain Stokes mention any other method of crossing 

 the water than on rude rafts, formed of bundles of rushes, or 

 sticks, tied together. In Western Australia, as also in South 

 Australia, even this device had never been hit on by the natives, 

 and the islands close to the mainland had never been visited by 

 them previously to the founding of the colonies. 



