tingent upon the season of the year, at which they 
may visit any particular district, have given to their 
mode of life, an unsettled and wandering character. 
The casual observer, or the passing traveller, has 
but little, therefore, to guide him in his estimate of 
the population of the country he may be in. A dis- 
trict that may at one time be thinly inhabited, or 
even altogether untenanted, may at another be teem- 
ing with population. The wanderer may at one 
time be surrounded by hundreds of savages, and at 
another, in the same place he may pass on alone and 
unheeded. 
At Lake Victoria, on the Murray, I have seen 
congregated upwards of six hundred natives at once, 
again I have passed through that neighbourhood 
and have scarcely seen a single individual; nor does 
this alone constitute the difficulty and uncertainty 
involved in estimating the numbers of the Abori- 
gines. Such are the silence and stealth with which 
all their movements are conducted, so slight a trace 
is left to indicate their line of march, and so small a 
clue by which to detect their presence, that the 
stranger finds it impossible to tell from any thing 
that he sees, whether he is in their vicinity or not. 
I have myself often when travelling, as I imagined 
in the most retired and solitary recesses of the forest, 
been suddenly surprised by the unexpected appear- 
ance of large bodies of natives, without being in the 
least able to conjecture whence they had come, 
or how they obtained the necessaries of life, 
VOL. II. 2 B 
