judices as to taste them;
whilst in proceeding to the northward, these trees decline in health and
growth, until about the parallel of Gantheaume Bay they totally
disappear, and even a native finds himself cut off from his ordinary
supplies of insects; the same circumstances taking place with regard to
the roots and other kinds of food at the same time, the traveller
necessarily finds himself reduced to cruel extremities. A native from the
plains, taken into an elevated mountainous district near his own country,
for the first time, is equally at fault.

"But in his own district a native is very differently situated; he knows
exactly what it produces, the proper time at which the several articles
are in season, and the readiest means of procuring them. According to
these circumstances he regulates his visits to the different portions of
his hunting ground; and I can only state that I have always found the
greatest abundance in their huts."

It is evident therefore that a European or even a stranger native would
perish in a district capable of supplying the necessaries of life, simply
because he had not the experience necessary to direct him where to search
for food, or judgment to inform him what article might be in season at
the particular time of his visit. It is equally the same with respect to
procuring water. The native inhabiting a scrubby and an arid district
has, from his knowledge of the country and from a long residence and
practical experience in the desert, many resources at command to supply
his wants, where the white man would faint or perish from thirst.

The very densest brushes, which to the latter are so formidable and
forbidding, hold out to the former advantages and inducements to resort
to them of more than ordinary temptation. Abounding in wild animals of
various kinds, they offer to the natives who frequent them an unlimited
supply of food: a facility for obtaining firewood, a grateful shade from
the heat, an effectual screen from the cold, and it has already been
shewn that they afford the means of satisfying their thirst by a process
but little known, and which from a difference in habits and temperament
would be but little available to the European.[Note 67 at end of para.]
In judging, therefore, of the character of any country, from the mere
fact of natives being seen there, or even of their being numerous, we must
take all these circumstances into consideration; and, in estimating the
faci