disposition. This verifies what I have before observed, as to the
remarkable differences of character that exist between many Australian
tribes, though living in the immediate neighbourhood of each other; for,
it will be remembered, that at no great distance we had experienced a
very different reception.

Those people amounted in number, with their families, to twenty-seven,
and came down to our party without any symptoms of hesitation. Both men
and women were finer than those we had seen in Adam Bay. The tallest male
measured five feet eleven, which is three inches less than a native
Flinders measured in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The teeth of these people
were ALL PERFECT, an additional proof that the ceremony of knocking them
out, like others practised in Australia, is very partially diffused. The
rite of circumcision, for instance, is only performed at King's Sound, on
the west side of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and near the head of the
Australian bight on the south. Mr. Eyre, who discovered the existence of
the rite on the last-mentioned part of the continent, infers that the
natives of the places I have mentioned must have had some communication
with each other through the interior; but it is possible that at a
distant period of time, circumcision may have been very generally
practised, and that having become gradually disused, the custom is now
only preserved at two or three points, widely separated from each other.
I do not advance this as a theory, but simply as a suggestion, as there
is some difficulty in supposing communication to have taken place across
the continent.

MIGRATION OF THE NATIVES.

Some light may be thrown on the migration of the aboriginal inhabitants
of Australia, by tracing the parts of the coast on which canoes are in