isposed of in some fantastic way. Their skins were black,
though not of the inky, coal-like color of the pure-blooded African
negro. Their hair was curly, but did not have a woolly crispness. The
features seemed to be more like those of the Malay than of the Negro
race, and Ned observed that the hair of the women hung down in wavy
plaits, which is not the case with the hair of the negro of the Congo or
the Nile. Every man in the party carried a spear, and Ned wondered why
they were not armed with bows and arrows.

"That is for the very simple reason," said their informant, "that the
Australian aborigines have never used the bow and arrow; their only
weapons are the spear, club, knife, and boomerang. Their principal
weapon for fighting is the waddy or club, and each tribe has a peculiar
shape for its waddies. This weapon is made of hard wood, and is somewhat
suggestive of the night stick of a New York policeman, with the
difference that it has a knob on the end to enable it to be grasped with
greater security. There is a rule in fighting with the waddy, that you
must hit your antagonist on the head. It is not fair to strike him in
any other part of the body with these weapons, and the man who would do
so would not be regarded as a gentleman in aboriginal society. The
difference in the waddies is such that you can very often tell what
tribe a party belongs to by examining one of their clubs.

"They are accustomed to spears from their childhood, and can throw them
very accurately for a distance of thirty or forty yards. I once saw a
considerable number of blacks together, and several white men of us got
up a competition in spear throwing. We chalked out the figure of a man
on the side of a building, and then paced off forty yards from it. We
offered a prize of one shilling to every black who would hit this figure
with the spear three times out of five at the distance indicated. We had
them take turns in succession, and when the competition was over we
found that we were obliged to give a shilling to every one of the
competitors, as all had hit it three times. Half of them did so four
times, and the other half the entire five times."

Ned asked what the spears were made of. He learned, in reply, that
sometimes they were single shafts of wood tipped with stone, bone, or
iron. Others had heads of hard wood, while the shafts consisted of light
reeds which grow on the banks of the rivers and lakes. The spears are
usually from