[110] A ludicrous instance of this mistake once occurred (and it may be said there is scarcely an individual who has travelled in the bush but has made a similar mistake although, perhaps, not to the same extent.) A settler lost himself in the bush, and thinking he saw a native at a distance, he hailed with the usual “Cu, he; cu, he,” (which can be heard at a great distance, and is borrowed from the natives,) until he made the woods resound; but receiving no reply, he galloped up to the object, and then discovered it was merely _a charred stump of a tree_; so this may be some apology for the poor kangaroos. [111] These animals, like the cattle, frequent those places where the grass, having been recently burnt, they meet with the sweet young herbage. This may account for our finding them so numerous about those situations, in preference to the plain, although the latter seemed to offer the temptation of more luxuriant but coarser feeding. [112] They are mentioned in the catalogue of the museum of the London Royal College of Surgeons, “Preparations of Natural History in Spirit,” Fasc. 1, part 4, p. 37, as a doubtful species of _Filaria_. “_Filaria Macropi majoris._” [113] This assertion accords with my remarks, for I did not observe these cysts in the females, but only in the male specimens I dissected. [114] The maggots can be produced alive from the parent fly by pressure upon the lower part of the abdomen; the annoyance of these flies is great during the summer season; depositing their progeny upon every thing, even blankets. Specimens of natural history, in the preparation of which arsenical soap had been used, the larva of this fly has been deposited, and found lying dead in clusters, from the effects of the poison. This renders dissection so difficult during the hot season of the year, and for some portions of the anatomy it is the only time for examining them in the recent state. I have even seen game “blown” a minute after it has been killed. During my journey, a man at one of the stations complained to me of a dull pain in his ear, and as if something was moving in it; he first felt it after sleeping in a hut a few nights previous. By pouring brine into the ear, a large white maggot crept out, and afterwards some smaller ones. The ear being well washed out, he suffered no more pain or inconvenience; no wound or disease of the ear appeared to exist. [115] On the surface of the tooth there is sometimes deposited a substance termed the _tartar_ of the teeth. It frequently assumes a yellow colour, with a smooth surface, in the ox and the sheep, and has been ignorantly considered as gold derived from the pasture. It is merely a precipitation from the saliva. Berzelius found it to consist of earthy phosphate, 79.0; mucus not yet decomposed, 12.5; peculiar salinary matter, 1.0; and animal matter, soluble in muriatic acid, 7.5 = 100.0.—_An. Phil._ vol. ii. p. 381.—_Quoted in Fleming’s Philosophy of Zoology_, vol. ii. p. 166.