unknown. This is scarcely credible: a heated shell or stone, filled by
rain water, might have discovered the secret. They preserved their fire,
usually by carrying a brand; if this was extinguished, they replaced it
by going back to their last encampment, where the fuel still smouldered.
It is said, that they were not ignorant of producing fire by friction.

_Food._--Their appetite was voracious: a woman was watched one day,
during which, beside a double ration of bread, she devoured more than
fifty eggs, as large as those of a duck. Mr. O'Connor saw a child, eight
years old, eat a kangaroo rat, and attack a cray-fish. The game they
cast into the fire, and when singed drew it out and extracted the
entrails; it was then returned to the embers, and when thoroughly
warmed, the process was completed. They were acquainted with the common
expedient of savage nations, who pass from repletion to hunger: they
tightened a girdle of kangaroo skin, which they wore when otherwise
naked. Fat they detested; some tribes also rejected the male, and others
the female wallaby, as food: the cause is unknown. A few vegetable
productions, as the native potato, and a fungus, which forces up the
ground, called native bread, and which tastes like cold boiled rice; the
fern and grass-tree, also yielded them food. White caterpillars and ant
eggs, and several other productions, supplemented their ordinary diet.
The animals on which they subsisted chiefly, were the emu, kangaroo,
wallaby, and the opossum: the latter living in trees. They obtained a
liquor from the cyder tree (_eucalyptus_), which grows on the Shannon,
and elsewhere: it is tapped like the maple; its juice, of the taste of
molasses, trickled down into a hole at the foot of the tree, and was
covered with a stone. By a natural fermentation, it became slightly
intoxicating; and in early days was liked by the stockmen.

During the winter, the natives visited the sea shore: they disappeared
from the settled districts about June, and returned in October. The
women were accustomed to dive for shell fish, which they placed in a
rude basket, tied round the waist. On these marine stations (as at
Pieman's River on the west coast), their huts were constructed with more
care. Heaps of oyster shells, which seem to be the accumulation of ages,
still attest their dependence on the abundance of the sea.

_Dress and Ornaments._--In summer, they were entirely naked: in the
winter, they protected the