recorded hy Mr, Gideon S. Laiig^ who saw a native detect,

without alighting from his horRe, the name of the person whose footprint was on the road, Hucli occurrences were common. It was on the rockj the scanty lichen, or hard and harren places, that the tracker made his white companions wonder. The reputation of courage and skill in war was the chief object of ambition. The pre-eminent man usually took several wives. Wives were sometimes given away. The hiisbaod had unrestrained power over them and his children. The women were drudges in the tribe; they carried burdens. They w^ere at best treated with contemp- tuous kindness, and often brutally. The hufibaiid was a law to himself; but there were instances of affection which redeemed human nature from the cruelty of the system. Children were generally ti^eated kindly, bat sometimes were put to death in early infancy to shake off useless burdens. Cannibalism was known in some tribes, but was abhorred in others. When resorted to, it was with secrecy and mysterious eagerness, as if the appetite were sharpened by a superstition as to supernatural resnlts. It was some- times unjustly imputed, when white men, driving the natives from their camps, found human hands preserved in nets. They were thought to be nifirsels for fuod, but they were the trophies of success, carried by the Australian as the scalp of his enemy was carried by the Cherokee. Custom varied so much in different tribes that a hand was carried as a memorial of a lost friend in «ome phices. Burial ceremonies differed in various districts. In some places graves were carefully dug with sticks; the body, wrapped at full length in bark of the melaleuca, was, amidst wailings and cutting of flesh by the women, buried with the property of the deceased. At other places bodies were interred in different postures. Some tribes exposed their dead on small trees, on win'eh they had made a plat- form for the purpose. Some constructed a low platform, sup- ported by stakes and forked branches. Some placed the body in the hollow of a tree, some in a cave. The mourning for a chieftain or distinguished warrior was intense and pro- longed. For the yomig or undistinguished little display of Tj'ef was erinced, and sometimes there was otter indiffer-