146 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



here everywhere such as may be accounted for on the hypothesis 

 that the present aborigines represent a blend of two, or at most 

 three 1 different elements in extremely remote times, with later 

 interminglings and fresh groupings of these same elements 

 through inevitable local shiftings and disturbances, but without 

 any serious addition of further foreign elements after the first 

 settlements. 



To the observer arriving on the north coast of Australia from 

 New Guinea this homogeneous character of the aborigines is 

 very striking. From a region of considerable ethnical confusion, 

 presenting all shades of transition from the full-blood Papuan to 

 the variable Melanesian, he enters a continent in which a strong 

 family likeness is at once detected between all the scattered 

 groups of its primitive inhabitants. This family likeness is more- 

 over so marked that, amid all the local differences, the natives are 

 everywhere instantly recognised as members of a single ethnical 

 division, and we at once realise the vast period of time needed for 

 the development of their highly specialised type. Their arrival is 

 referred by Mr A. W. Howitt to a time anterior to 



Early 



Peopling of the present distribution of land and water, as they 

 must have reached their present homes by some 

 now submerged land-connection, or at all events across narrow 

 channels navigable by frail canoes or catamarans. An immense 

 period of time, he contends, is " one of the elements of any 

 solution of the problem," and during that period the natives have 

 been completely isolated within a continental area of develop- 

 ment. They arrived, he thinks, by a land-bridge either connecting 

 with the Indo-Asiatic continent, or by a land extension of the 

 Austral continent towards the north-west, or over some shallow 

 channels between Australia and those lands 2 . 



1 Dr O. Finsch, who studied specimens from regions as wide apart as South 

 Queensland, the Gulf of Carpentaria and West Australia, is satisfied with one: 

 " Auf Grund dieser Untersuchungen iiberzeugte ich mich, dass die Australier 

 eine eigene Rasse bilden, welche den Melanesiern oder Papuas entfernter 

 stehen als letztere reinen Afrikanischen Negern " (A'etse in dcr Siidsee, 1884, 

 p. 66). 



2 Paper read at the Meeting of the Australian Ass. for the Adv. of Science, 

 Sydney, Jan. 1898. I need scarcely point out how completely these views 

 harmonise with those advanced in Eth. Chap. XI. 



