were so reduced in numbers that they sought companionship with others with whom they had formerly been at enmity, and dread and suffering were amongst them everywhere.
There is a kind of sickness that affects the natives who live amongst the whites, or on the stations where they are required to labor, which appears to be peculiar to them. They mope, they sit stupidly over a fire, and at length the lungs or some other parts of the body are attacked, and they die. The Right Reverend Dr. Rosendo Salvado and others have noticed this melancholy and the sickness that follows. It does not usually yield to treatment by European doctors. But medical officers find much difficulty in managing the blacks when they are sick. They are impatient of control; they follow the habits they have acquired amongst their own people, and even with the utmost care many die that, if they had followed advice and taken the medicines prescribed for them, would have lived.
The native doctors are, I think, everywhere much trusted by the blacks. They like their modes of cure, and they believe in them. A man with failing sight will gladly subject himself to treatment by a native doctor, who, after some incantations and mummeries, will pretend to extract straws or pieces of wood from the eyes; and after these things are done the patient is supposed to recover, unless some stronger magician in another tribe has interfered injuriously with the doctor's operations. Their vapour baths and their decoctions are more in accordance with our notions of treating diseases; and these, we may suppose, did not arise out of their superstitions, but were the results of experience.
It will be observed that in some cases females are employed as doctors, and that their power to heal is believed in.
The natives rapidly recover from wounds. Such injuries as would be fatal in the case of Europeans are accounted as nothing amongst the blacks. A spear through the body, a broken skull, or ghastly wounds inflicted by the boomerang, are quickly cured. And they are very patient. A man pierced by a barbed spear will carry the barbs in his body until suppuration ensues and such a destruction of the tissues as to admit of the wood being pulled out.
This is scarcely consistent with the theory of a low vitality. In his native state the black is probably as healthy and has a body in all its parts as capable of repairing injuries unassisted as the animals that live with him in the forests. Under circumstances different from those natural to him—in the artificial life which the whites have forced upon him—he is not always very strong nor very healthy. The process of selection which nature has employed in fitting him for the hanuts he loves is one which renders him a ready victim to the diseases that are the results of the kind of civilization now existing; diseases which would be unknown were civilization based on natural laws, and not crippled by old superstitions nor held in bondage by vicious inventions.
The dresses and personal ornaments of the natives of Australia, as may be supposed, are simple. The climate does not require any thick close clothing; and the habits of the people forbid the use of many personal decorations within their reach. The opossum cloak, the strips of skin worn around the loins, and
