this last resource of nations none could tell. The whites only wished to be let alone. They did not treat the black brother unkindly. Far from it, There were other philanthropists in the district besides myself, notably Mr. James Dawson, of Kangatong, then known as Cox's Heifer Station, distant about twenty miles to the east. Then, as now, my old friend and his amiable family were most anxious to ameliorate his condition. They fed and clothed the lubras and children. They even were sufficiently interested to make a patient study of the language, and to acquire a knowledge of tribal rites, ceremonies, and customs, which has lately been embodied in a valuable volume, praised even by the super critical Saturday Review. It is a fact, not altogether without bearing on the historical analysis of pioneer squatting, that four of us—rude colonists, as most English writers persist in believing all Australian settlers to be—were, in greater or less degree, authors.
Charles Macknight had a logically clear and trenchant way of putting things. As a political and social essayist he attracted much attention during the latter years of his life. His theories of stock-breeding, culled from contemporary journals, are still prized and acted upon by experienced pastoralists. Of the two brothers Aplin, the elder was a lover of scientific research, and, having a strong natural taste for geology, addressed himself to it with such perseverance that he became second only to Mr. Selwyn, the late Victorian Government geologist, a man of European reputation, and was himself enabled to fill the position of Government
