81 door. At this burst of light, “plenty Blackfellow jump up, sing all the same Whitefellow.” The said young lady was once walking upon this dull earth with a stick in her hand to kill snakes ; giving a sharper blow than usual, the stick broke, and flame issued. This was the origin of fire. Mr. Hull also refers to the Yarra tribe giving names to two stars of Orion, and styling them father and mother. They believed the moon to be the husband of the sun, like our own ancestors the Anglo Saxons. However disposed to be amused at the silly fancies of our rude natives, if we look at the popular belief of Christianized English men in the Norman era, the laugh may be on the other side. Grave men wrote Latin treatises, in which appeared such refined ideas as,—that the world was flat, and 12,000 miles long by 6,000 broad; that the sun was red in the morning, because of the reflection of the fires of hell ; that there were women near Babylon with long beards ; that somewhere in Africa men carried their eyes in their breasts ; that pepper was black from the fires of forests to drive away the serpents ; and that in India gigantic ants dug gold, and sold it to merchants for young camels to eat. Even in the days of Shakespeare we have a learned man writing to disprove the Englishman’s notion, that bears licked their cubs into shape ; that elephants slept leaning against trees ; that diamonds were softened by the blood of goats; that griffins existed; that moles had no eyes ; that cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg grew on the same tree ; and that the Basil insect propagated scorpions in the brains of man. The Royal Society of London wrote to a doctor in Java, to know if it were true that there was a tree near Sumatra that sank into the earth at a touch, that had a worm at its root, and that when dry, changed into stone. DISEASES. Upon the first visit of the Whites, the natives of Port Phillip were found to be a healthy, happy race—excepting upon the Murray, where Sturt observed the dreaded plague for vice. Proximity to tribes acquainted with the older settlement of New South Wales may readily account for the appearance of the Europeans’ blight
