black, we may say, witli Minerva to tiie Furies in ^schylus, " there 
being two present we liave heard more than enough from the one 
side." In the debtor and creditor account o£ murder and outrage 
the balance is decidedly against the white man. Every white man 
murdered by blacks is represented by at least fifty blacks murdered 
by white men. The white man has, beyond all question, been the more 
unscrupulous and deliberate murderer of the two. The civilised man is 
simply the savage with a thin and plausibly attractive veneer over the 
surface. The savage usually kills out of a spirit of revenge for some 
real or fancied inj ury, past or present. Wholesale murder is yearlj^ 
done by civilised men solely for the sake of gain. The civilised ruffian 
has no merit above the savage ruffian in the scale of humanity. The 
average white man is far above the average savage ; the average savage 
is a far nobler animal than the lowest type of white men. We cannot 
judge the savage by our own standard of right and wrong, because his 
mind is moulded by different external influences operating in the direc- 
tion of entirely different mental phenomena. In all cases the strong 
colonising race has treated harshly and contemptuously the weak race 
which it displaced. This is the history of all new countries, and the 
slaughter of the aboriginals by the invader is the one monotonously 
conspicuous fact in all the records of colonisation. No euphemism 
of expression or sentimentalism of thought can conceal that from the 
historian or the student of ethnology. 
In all human progress and the transition and rise and fall of 
nations we see the all-ruling influence of the law of the survival of the 
strongest, a law probably synonymous with that of the survival of the 
fittest, on the assumption that the strongest are the fittest to survive. 
The Australian blacks are moving rapidly on into the eternal darkness 
in which all savage and inferior races are surely destined to disappear. 
All effort to preserve them, though creditable to our humanity, is a 
poor compliment to our knowledge of those inexorable laws whose 
operations are as apparent as our own existence. Their epoch of time 
is near its termination, the shadows deepening towards the everlasting 
night. It is a mournful picture, that of the old inhabitants who for 
unknown ages have roamed the primeval forests of this mighty con- 
tinent, now moving off silent and swift-footed into oblivion before the 
presence of the white strangers who walk over the graves of a dead 
race with as much unconcern as the blacks themselves trod over the rock 
sepulchres of the diprotodon and nototherium on the Darling Downs. 
In obtaining the native names for prominent localities we have to 
face a difficulty in meeting a number of different names for the one 
place. Each mountain peak has its own name, and not only ever}^ 
valley and river and creek, but different parts of these have their 
distinct and characteristic titles. There is, therefore, a considerable 
amount of discretion required to avoid involving the names in hopeless 
confusion. Many of their names indicate by their sound some 
peculiarity in that on which they are bestowed. On the eastern side 
of }3artle Erere is a waterfall called " Chickaringadingadee," the name 
corresponding in a remarkable manner with the sound of the waters. 
The black cockatoo is called "karrna," in imitation of his harsh, 
discordant note. The Barron blacks call the dragoon bird " derrim- 
derrim," and the Clarence blacks, in New South Wales, call the 
spur- winged plover " dibbin-dibbin," both birds having exactly the same 
peculiar movement in running. Occasionally two tribes use the same 
