the women in their search for these edible roots. Thus to quote Sir George Grey: “We now crossed the dry bed of a stream, and from that emerged upon a tract of light fertile soil, quite overrun with _warran_ [yam] plants, the root of which is a favourite article of food with the natives. This was the first time we had yet seen this plant on our journey, and now for three and a half consecutive miles we traversed a fertile piece of land, literally perforated with the holes the natives had made to dig this root; indeed we could with difficulty walk across it on that account, whilst this tract extended east and west as far as we could see.”(406) Again, in the valley of the Lower Murray River a kind of yam (_Microseris Forsteri_) grew plentifully and was easily found in the spring and early summer, when the roots were dug up out of the earth by the women and children. The root is small and of a sweetish taste and grows throughout the greater part of Australia outside the tropics; on the alpine pastures of the high Australian mountains it attains to a much larger size and furnishes a not unpalatable food.(407) But the women gather edible herbs and seeds as well as roots; and at evening they may be seen trooping in to the camp, each with a great bundle of sow-thistles, dandelions, or trefoil on her head,(408) or carrying wooden vessels filled with seeds, which they afterwards grind up between stones and knead into a paste with water or bake into cakes.(409) Among the aborigines of central Victoria, while the men hunted, the women dug up edible roots and gathered succulent vegetables, such as the young tops of the _munya_, the sow-thistle, and several kinds of fig-marigold. The implement which they used to dig up roots with was a pole seven or eight feet long, hardened in the fire and pointed at the end, which also served them as a weapon both of defence and of offence.(410) Among the tribes of Central Australia the principal vegetable food is the seed of a species of Claytonia, called by white men _munyeru_, which the women gather in large quantities and winnow by pouring the little black seeds from one vessel to another so as to let the wind blow the loose husks away.(411)