240 JOHN FRASER. 



on Liverpool Plains, mal ; at Wellington, mal-anda ; in Southern 

 Queensland, beahda, muray, bardja, beaiya; in the Northern 

 Territory of South Australia, mo-tu, wa-rat ; at Port Essington, 

 w a-d a t. 



Besides these, some other words for the number 'one' are used 

 in various parts of Australia, but those I have given all proceed 

 from one original root, which it will be our duty now to discover. 

 And I notice, first of all, that one word in the list stretches along 

 the whole extent of seaboard from the Illawarra district to the 

 Hastings — the word wakul — and this fact affords the presump- 

 tion that all that coast line was occupied by the same tribe, or by 

 tribes closely akin ; for the tribes a little inland say mal and mal- 

 anda for 'one.' Wakul, then, was the word used by the Sydney 

 blacks, as Collins testifies. If a chemist has a compound substance 

 handed to him for analysis, he experiments on it, and tests it in 

 order to discover its elements. Let us do so with wakul ; it is a 

 compound, for simple roots are usually monosyllables; but are its 

 parts wa + kul or wak + uH Here I remember that, in the same 

 region where wakul exists, there is a word kara-kul, 'a wizard, 

 doctor or medicine-man,' but inland he is called kara-ji. This 

 satisfies me as proof that the -kul is merely a formative syllable, 

 and that the root is wa. And this conviction is strengthened 

 when I cast my eye over the above list of words ; for they all 

 begin with the syllable m a or some modification of it, the rest of 

 each word consisting of various formative syllables. As I have 

 now got hold of a clue to a solution, I reflect that the initial labial 

 of a root- word may assume various forms ; thus, p, b, m, may inter- 

 change, and may easily become/", wh, v, w. There can be no doubt, 

 for instance, that the Latin pater, the German vater, and the 

 English father, are the same word; there p=f=V, and in one 

 district in Scotland, the people always say fat for what and far 

 for where ; so also the Maori whatu is the Samoan fatu ; that 

 is f=wh : b and m also are interchangeable, in oriental languages 

 especially, for m is only the sound of the letter b modified by the 

 emission of a breathing through the nose ; m is therefore regarded 

 as a b nasalized. I note also that the words under consideration 

 all begin with the cognate sounds of 7)i, b, or w, except yalla; 

 and this example I think must have been at one time walla, 

 that is, uala, of which the u has obtained the sound of i (y); or 

 wa-la may come from the same root as wa-kul, the difference 

 lying only in the termination. The other vowels of our root word 

 are o, u, e, i, ai, all of which in Australian are modifications of 

 the original sound a. 



Having now discovered the root-germ from which our Sydney 

 friend wakul proceeded, and having noted the various guises 

 which he has assumed in these colonies, we must next ask where 



