'According to native custom, no one was on watch at the camp, and I have often heard the blacks say that their half starved dogs seldom give the alarm in cases of strange blacks, though they would bark if the intruders were white men. They gently raised the rugs a little from the chests of the doomed wretches, and at a given signal, with a simultaneous yell, plunged their long barbed spears into the bosoms or backs of the sleepers. Then from the mia-mias, which were quickly overturned, came the shrieks of the dying, the screams of the women and children, blows of clubs, the vociferation of the prostrate, who were trying to defend themselves; the barking of the dogs and the yells of the assailants, who numbered fully three to one. Altogether it was a ghastly, horrible scene that the pale moon looked down on that night at Thule.' Mr. Carr describes the agility displayed by the men in such feats as mounting the trees for opossums, &c., and the illustration on page 12 tells the story of one of these hunts. Of Australian weapons the most interesting is the boomerang. Mr. Brough Smyth, in his work on the aborigines, discredits the idea that there is any connection between the boomerang and the throwing or crooked stick of the Dravidian races of India, as has been contended, and insists that it is _sui generis_. Its peculiar action depends upon a twist in the wood, the twist of the screw, which may be imperceptible to the careless observer, but which is always there. [Illustration: A BOOMERANG.]