Thrift is unknown to the Australian. His life alternates between satiety and semi-starvation. In summer he goes naked, but in winter he wraps himself in kangaroo skins. A girdle of hair bound about his loins holds his dowak, as his digging-stick is called, and an apron of skins suspended from the girdle affords a protection from shrubs. His food consists largely of animals, which he devours alive, and includes lizards, snakes, the heads being rejected, frogs, white ants, larvæ and moths. Other animals are roasted, showing that the Australian knows, contrary to an opinion that once prevailed, the method of kindling a fire. In seasons of dearth, when there is a paucity of food-material, cannibalism is general. He then makes an attack upon a neighboring tribe who is his enemy, and if he cannot obtain food in this manner, he scruples not to fall back upon his wife and his children. One obligation of the wife is to keep her husband supplied with vegetable food, such as the roots of the wild yam, seeds of the acacia, sophoræ, leaves of the grass-tree, etc. Failing to produce a sufficiency, she is liberally treated with maulings and spearings, so that a wife generally appears bruised and gashed all over her body. Among the different tribes of Australians, the boomerang is the principal weapon. This is a flat stick, three feet in length, and curves at the centre. It is thrown into the air among birds, jerks in a zigzag, spiral or circular fashion, and when thrown by a person skilled in its use is sure to bring down a few individuals at every throwing. Besides this weapon they have the throwing-stick, flint-pointed spears, shields, stone-hatchets, digging-sticks, netting-needles, nets of sinews, fibres or hairs, water-skins and canoes. No government exists among this people outside that of the family, and no laws except certain traditionary rules about property. As for their religion, they have little save their terror of ghosts and demons, and certain superstitious traditional rites applicable to epochs in a man’s life, but more especially so at the time of his burial. At ten years of age, a boy is covered with blood; at ten to fourteen, he is circumcised in the north and south of Australia, but not in the west or on the Murray River; and at twenty, he is tattooed or scarred. Felicity after death is the reward of proper burial, but a man dying in battle or rotting in a field becomes an evil genius.