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PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS SECTION E. 
a hand and arm, painted black, and the rock white, so that on entering 
that part of the cave it appeared as if a human hand and arm were 
projecting through a crevice admitting light. A somewhat analogous 
instance of native art is mentioned by E. Giles, in his explorations 
west of the Adelaide and Port Darwin telegraph line, where, in a cave, 
he saw depicted the body of a snake, with its head apparently in a hole 
in the rock. 
Further remarkable discoveries were made by Sir George Grey, a 
short time afterwards, when he found another cave, and (cut out of 
the solid stone) discovered the profile of a human face ( Plate F) 
fronting this cave. The head was 2 feet in length and 16 inches in 
breadth in the broadest part, the ear being rather badly placed, other- 
wise the whole of the work was good, and, he remarks, “far superior 
to what a savage* race could be supposed capable of executing.” The 
next day he found another cave, elevated at its entrance several feet 
above the level of the ground. In this was a painting of the figure of 
a man 10 feet G inches in length, clothed from the chin downwards in 
a red garment, which reached to the wrists and ankles. Beyond this 
red dress the feet and hands protruded, and were badly executed. 
The face and head of the figure were enveloped in a succession of 
circular bandages or rollers, coloured red, yellow, and white, and the 
eyes were the only features represented on the face. Upon the 
highest of the bandages or rollers were a series of lines painted in 
red, but although so regularly done as to indicate that they had some 
meaning, it was impossible to tell whether they were intended to 
depict written characters or some ornament for the head. On each 
side of the cave were representations of turtles and extraordinary 
animals, such as gigantic snakes ( Plate F)> 
All writers on Australia describe the natives as devoid of the 
faculty of invention ; and if this he so, it is all the more marvellous 
how, and by what means, the imagination of the natives could conceive 
and depict such striking representations as these above described. It 
is not unreasonable to suppose that the artist who painted these 
pictures, especially of the one clothed in so correct a dress, and again 
of the one first described with the circle of rays of apparent light, 
must have had intercourse with a people clad in some such garments, 
and their heads protected by some covering like turbans. Evidently 
the unknown artist loved his work, and these illustrations attest to 
the more than ordinary character of the untutored savage who drew 
them. 
In the same distiict (near Kimberley, in Vest Australia), Mr. 
Harry Stockdale discovered a native art gallery on the McLeod River; 
the river running between immense cliffs from 200 feet to 300 feet 
high, and almost perpendicular, on the large smooth slabs of which 
were a great number of native drawings, occupying a space of fully 
twenty yards, and consisting of kangaroos, the platypus, and a figure 
resembling a monkey, blackfellows dancing the corroborec, the bust of 
a native woman, and many others, besides an excellent life-size draw- 
ing of an emu, depicted as feeding. Mr. Stockdale informed me 
“the drawing of the emu was true to nature and well done,” and that 
“the whole of the drawings were filled in or shaded, and showed much 
artistic skill, the mouths of their faces alone being badly represented.” 
Mr. O’Donnell, writing to me in 1886, said that he had found in the 
