[37] Nay, our fellow-countrymen in the Australian colonies, can, by no means, endure a strict trial, even by their own rule of right. Take, for instance, the following very common case:--The kangaroo disappears from cattle-runs, and is also killed by stockmen, merely for the sake of the skin; but no mercy is shown to the natives who may help themselves to a bullock or a sheep. They do not, it is true, breed and feed the kangaroos as our people rear and fatten cattle, but, at least, the wild animals are bred and fed upon their land, and consequently belong to them. The native population of Australia is very peculiar in many respects, not exactly resembling any other known race of human beings in the world. They are more nearly akin to the Africans than to any others, and they have, accordingly, been sometimes called _the Eastern Negroes_, having the same thick lips, high cheek-bones, sunken eyes, and legs without calves, which distinguish the native of Africa; but, with the exception of Van Diemen's Land, and the adjoining coasts, the woolly hair of the negro is not to be found among them, nor is the nose usually so flat, or the forehead so low. They are seldom very tall, but generally well made; and their bodily activity is most surprising; nor is their courage at all to be despised. The Australian native has always been pointed out as being the lowest specimen of human nature, and, since, in every scale of degrees, one must be lowest, this is probably correct enough; yet we are by no means to give too hasty credit to the accounts of their condition, which have been given by those whose interest it may have been to represent them in as unfavourable a light as possible, or whose opportunities of judging have been few and scanty, compared with their hasty willingness to pass judgment upon them. Men, more or less busily engaged in killing and taking possession, are not likely to make a very favourable report of those poor creatures into whose inheritance they have come; mere self-defence would tempt them to try to lessen the greatness of their crimes, by asserting the victims of these to be scarcely deserving of a better fate, and, in the present instance, the actual condition of the native population would be very favourable to excuses of this kind. Or, even without this evil intention of excusing wrong by slandering those that suffer it, many men, with but few means of understanding their character, may have spoken decidedly respecting the Australian natives, and that, too, in language even harsher than their degraded state would justify. Disgusting and horrid many of their habits and customs undoubtedly are, yet they appear even more so at first sight, and to one only imperfectly acquainted with them; especially when (which often happens) not the slightest allowance is made for the peculiar situation of the savage, but he is taken at once from the midst of his naked barbarity, and tried by the rules of