of those children that are yet unable to travel, the perpetual search for food, and preparation of it when it is obtained, besides many other laborious offices performed by the women, all which being reckoned up together, will form a life of toil and misery, which we may hope is endured by no other human beings beside the females of Australia. Nor is such treatment without its ill effect upon the tempers and dispositions of the female sex. The ferocity of the women, when it is excited, exceeds that of the men; they deal dreadful blows at one another with their long sticks, and, if ever the husband is about to spear in the leg, or beat, one of his wives, the others are certain to set on her, and treat her with great inhumanity. [43] The men frequently indulge a great degree of indolence at the expense of the women, who are compelled to sit in their canoe, exposed to the fervour of a mid-day sun, hour after hour, chanting their little song, and inviting the fish beneath them to take their bait; for without a sufficient quantity to make a meal for their tyrants, who are lying asleep at their ease, they would meet but a rude reception on their landing.--COLLINS' _Account of Colony of New South Wales_, p. 387. [44] Playing at "stealing a wife" is a common game with the Australian children. One custom, which to Europeans seems extremely remarkable, is that of the family name of the _mother_, and not of the _father_, becoming the surname of the children of either sex. And another, connected with this, forbids a man from marrying with a woman of his own family name. Each family has for its crest or sign, or _kobong_, as they call it, some animal or vegetable; and a certain mysterious connexion is supposed to exist between a family and its _kobong_; so that a member of the family will never kill an animal of the same species with his _kobong_, should he find it asleep; indeed, he always kills it reluctantly, and never without affording it a chance of escape.[45] This arises from the family belief that some one individual of the species is their nearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime, and is to be carefully avoided. And, in like manner, a native having a vegetable for a _kobong_ may not gather it under certain circumstances, and at a particular period of the year. It is said that they occasionally exchange surnames with their friends, a custom which is supposed to have prevailed among the Jews; and they have another practice resembling the same people, which is, that when a husband dies, his brother takes the wife.[46] Among beings who hold life so cheaply, it cannot be a matter of surprise that the destruction of infants should be occasionally practised, more especially in cases where the child is born with any natural deformity: nor is it an excuse for these barbarians that the polished nations of ancient Greece and Italy habitually committed the like atrocities, or