Blue Mountains in New South Wales. 167 



Caledonia. Their hair is woolly, thick, and arranged in hanging 

 locks; their size is variable, but in general moderate, their 

 average height being five feet four inches. Their cheek-bones 

 are prominent, the nose broad and flat, the mouth large,' the lips 

 thick ; their extremities, although slender in the greater number 

 of cases, are often regularly proportioned. Separated into scat- 

 tered tribes, without mutual communication, and wandering 

 about in search of a precarious subsistence, each tribe has creat- 

 ed a language of its own, or has been influenced by its local po- 

 sition in the developement of its industry, which is always very 

 limited. The poverty of the soil, and the rigour of the climate, 

 must have exerted an influence upon the race, and deteriorated 

 it ; and it is from this source that the slight differences arise, 

 which seem to separate it from the African negro race, with 

 which, however, an attentive examination shews it to be identi- 

 cal. One may conceive the influence which, in the course of time, 

 a country must have, which produces no eatable fruit : the inha- 

 bitants must, have betaken themselves to hunting and fishing, 

 and become nomadic ; they would, therefore, have regarded as 

 useless the formation of permanent villages, and must have con- 

 fined themselves to temporary places of shelter. They would 

 also have chosen the most indispensable and the most simple im- 

 plements ; they would have constructed their canoes of enca- 

 lyptus bark, tied at the two extremities,— or made use of logs, 

 in the form of rafts, to go into the bays and creeks. The negro 

 race, besides, no where shews itself remarkable for its intellect, 

 and every thing announces it to be stationary in its ideas. It 

 has characters which aie peculiar to itself, in whatever part its 

 branches are met with. These characters are, the divergence 

 of language of each particular tribe; their common taste for 

 raising conical eminences upon the skin, which is found to pre- 

 vail as well in Congo, Madagascar, and New Guinea, as in all 

 the parts of New Holland, — and never in the yellow Oceanic 

 race ; a peculiar and general custom of marking the face with 

 red and white powders in broad streaks, or of covering the hair 

 with ochre ; the iiabit of not concealing the organs of genera- 

 tion * ; that of passing a stick through the septum of the nose ; 

 &c. These essential characters are in opposition to those of the 



• In all those which have not had any long continued communication with 

 Europeans. 



