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[Page 8]
inhabitants of New Holland are all of one and the same race, with some little variations depending on climate and situation. As a proof of this conclusion, and that they must have held the same date of aborigines, words denoting certain parts of the body were found to be the same in the first and last of the above mentioned places, in one instance corresponding with a word taken notice of by Cook in Endeavour river. It is méŭl signifying the eyes.
The natives in Hervey's and Keppel's bays possess a strange peculiarity. It is a tumifaction [tumefaction] of the integuments in the outside of each wrist immediately over the projection of the lower end of the ulna which lay lies hid under it. This tumifaction had a soft and membranous feel and stretched longitudinally between two and three inches. The skin was very slightly callous. They expressed no uneasiness when it was roughly handled. At the first place upwards of twenty men and a boy had it and equally in the same degree; at the last place there were about a dozen men and two boys, which boys appeared younger than the one we had seen at the first place and neither of them, as also one of the men had the slightest degree of tumifaction about their wrists. They differed in nothing else from the rest of the natives. At the latter place they gave it the name - mōōlûra.
Their is another strange peculiarity that deserves to be particularly mentioned. The natives we saw in the Gulph of Carpentaria were circumcised - the prepuce being so completely removed that not a vestige of it was to be seen; the franum, however, remained perfect. One of the natives