All these questions may throw much light upon the relation between the writer's statement in its final form and the actual state of things to which it refers. These questions are also in close connection with the point mentioned below, touching the profession of an observer. For it is usually the privilege of the missionaries to be in a long and intimate contact with the natives, to have their confidence, and sometimes to understand even their language, while it is the ethnographer's privilege to understand the aim of his inquiries. In some cases there are fairly detailed data about these points, and such information about the conditions and circumstances under which the writer got his evidence greatly increases its value. In all cases where the evidence is contained in memoirs, diaries, descriptions of travels, expeditions, etc., it is possible to form an idea as to what kind of relation existed between the respective author and the material of his observation. So it appears that Curr and Salvado had especially good opportunities; it is possible to picture the way in which authors like Collins, Taplin, Grey, Eyre, Lumholtz, Angas, Strehlow and others, came into contact with the natives. This is much more difficult to say in the case of writers who wrote only short articles (Oldfield, Stanbridge, Bonney, Palmer, Cameron and others), which merely give information without any details as to how it was gathered. In the case of ethnographers, observing themselves or collecting the observations of others--like Howitt, Spencer and Gillen, Roth, and some others--we might expect to be informed minutely about the way in which they obtained their information. Unfortunately this is only partly the case.