But these are merely reveries of the closet, dreams of the inexperienced, and have no real foundation in as far at least as Australia is concerned.

That the first natives who were placed on that continent must have been instructed how to provide for their wants, how to form weapons suited to their circumstances, how to select roots, and to capture animals fitted for food, has been demonstrated over and over again, but at no time more forcibly than when the portion of my party, under Mr.Walker, were coming overland from Gantheaume Bay to Perth.

In this case six full-grown men, provided with knives, fishing-hooks and lines, a kettle, vessels to hold water and cook their food, arms, and a small quantity of ammunition, and many of them possessing considerable experience in the bush, must all have perished from hunger had not timely assistance reached them; and this from their ignorance as to which of the productions surrounding them would serve to support life, and not from neglect in making the requisite experiments to endeavour to ascertain this, for the poor fellows ate everything they could find which appeared to afford sustenance; yet notwithstanding all the comparative advantages they were in possession of, if the relief sent from Perth had not reached them, death must have overtaken all.

The same result has frequently occurred under nearly similar circumstances.

If then men, full-grown, in the complete possession of all their faculties, provided with fire and many useful implements, and aided by considerable experience, from ignorance of the natural productions of a country, and the means of procuring these, die from hunger ere they can learn how to supply their wants, is it probable that an unarmed, naked, untaught man, who knew not even how to make his senses act in concert until he had from experience acquired this knowledge, could by any possibility have avoided a fate, which would inevitably overtake the European in possession of all his superior energies of mind and character, if he chance not to fall in with friendly natives.
ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF THE NATIVE LAWS.
The laws of this people are unfitted for the government of a single isolated family, some of them being only adapted for the regulation of an assemblage of families; they could therefore not have been a series of rules given by the first father to his children: again, they could not have been rules given by an assembly of the first fathers to their children, for there are these remarkable features about them that some are of such a nature as to compel those subject to them to remain in a state of barbarism, whilst others are adapted to the wants and necessities of savage RACES, as well as to prevent too close intermarriages of a people who preserve no written or symbolical records of any kind; and in all these instances the desired ends are obtained by the simplest means, so that we are necessitated to admit that, when these rules were planned it was foreseen that the race submitted to them would be savages, and under this foresight the necessary provision was made for the event.
We cannot argue that this race was originally in a state of civilization, and that from the introduction of certain laws amongst them, the tendency of which was to reduce them to a state of barbarism, or from some other cause, they had gradually sunk to their present condition; for in that case how could those laws which provide solely for the necessities of a people in their present state have been introduced amongst them?
Neither could they have been invented according to necessities and emergencies which a savage state has produced, for under such circumstances it is impossible that they could have been promulgated and enforced throughout so wide a range of country, and amongst a dispersed race of barbarians of such a variety of dispositions, who acknowledge no chief or lawgiver, and are so characteristically impatient of restraint.
Without in this place attempting to form and to support any theories founded upon the views I have just put forward, I may state my impression that it would seem, from the laws and customs of the natives of Australia, to have been willed that this people should until a certain period remain in their present condition, which is consequently not the result of mere accident, or of the natural constitution of man.