overland from Gantheaume Bay to Perth. In this case six full-grown men,
provided with knives, fishing-hooks and lines, a kettle, vessels to hold
water and cook their food, arms, and a small quantity of ammunition, and
many of them possessing considerable experience in the bush, must all
have perished from hunger had not timely assistance reached them; and
this from their ignorance as to which of the productions surrounding them
would serve to support life, and not from neglect in making the requisite
experiments to endeavour to ascertain this, for the poor fellows ate
everything they could find which appeared to afford sustenance; yet
notwithstanding all the comparative advantages they were in possession
of, if the relief sent from Perth had not reached them, death must have
overtaken all. The same result has frequently occurred under nearly
similar circumstances. If then men, full-grown, in the complete
possession of all their faculties, provided with fire and many useful
implements, and aided by considerable experience, from ignorance of the
natural productions of a country, and the means of procuring these, die
from hunger ere they can learn how to supply their wants, is it probable
that an unarmed, naked, untaught man, who knew not even how to make his
senses act in concert until he had from experience acquired this
knowledge, could by any possibility have avoided a fate, which would
inevitably overtake the European in possession of all his superior
energies of mind and character, if he chance not to fall in with friendly
natives.

ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF THE NATIVE LAWS.

The laws of this people are unfitted for the government of a single
isolated family, some of them being only adapted for the regulation of an
assemblage of families; they could therefore not have been a series of
rules given by the first father to his children: again, they could not
have been rules given by an assembly of the first fathers to their
children, for there are these remarkable features about them that some
are of such a nature as to compel those subject to them to remain in a
state of barbarism, whilst others are adapted to the wants and
necessities of savage RACES, as well as to prevent too close
intermarriages of a people who preserve no written or symbolical records
of any kind; and in all these instances the desired ends are obtained by
the simplest means, so that we are necessitated to admit that, when these
rules were planned