Now the parrot is a bird that often frequents a mountainous country, and always inhabits one having timber of a better description and larger growth than the miserable shrubs met with along the coast; it is a bird too that always lives within reach of permanent fresh-water, as rivers, lakes, creeks, pools, etc.

Can there then be such in the interior, with so barren and arid a region, bounding it?
and how are we to commence an examination with so many difficulties and embarrassments attending the very outset?
The second series of facts which have attracted my attention, relate to the Aborigines.

It is a well known circumstance that the dialects, customs, and pursuits in use among them in the various parts of the continent, differ very much from each other in some particulars, and yet that there is such a general similarity in the aggregate as to leave no room to doubt that all the Aborigines of Australia have had one common origin, and are in reality one and the same race.

If this then is really the case, they must formerly have spread over the continent from one first point, and this brings me to the Third reason I have mentioned as being one, from which I infer, that there is not an inland sea, viz., the coincidence observable in the physical appearance, customs, character, and pursuits of the Aborigines, at opposite points of the continent, whilst no such coincidence exists along the intervening lines of coast connecting those two points, and which naturally follows from the circumstances connected with the present location of the various tribes in which this is observable, and with the route which they must have taken to arrive at the places they now occupy on the continent.

[Note 37 at end of para.] I believe that the idea of attempting to deduce the character of the continent, and the most probable line for crossing it, from the circumstances and habits of the natives inhabiting the coast line is quite a novel one.