METHODS AND RESULTS OF ETHNOLOGY. 225 



superfluity with which they dispense; and though 

 they have some singular weapons, almost peculiar 

 to themselves, they are wholly unacquainted with 

 bows and arrows. 



It is but a step, as it were, across Bass's Straits 

 to Tasmania. Neither climate nor the character- 

 istic forms of vegetable or animal life change 

 largely on the south side of the Straits, but the 

 early voyagers found Man singularly different from 

 him on the north side. The skin of the Tasmanian 

 was dark, though he lived between parallels of lati- 

 tude corresponding with those of middle Europe in 

 our own hemisphere; his jaws projected, his head 

 was long and narrow; his civilization was about on 

 a footing with that of the Australian, if not lower, 

 for I cannot discover that the Tasmanian under- 

 stood the use of the throwing-stick. But he dif- 

 fered from the Australian in his woolly, negro-like 

 hair; whence the name of Negkito, which has 

 been applied to him and his congeners. 



Such Negritos — differing more or less from the 

 Tasmanian but agreeing with him in dark skin and 

 woolly hair — occupy New Caledonia, the New Heb- 

 rides, the Louisiade Archipelago; and stretching 

 to the Papuan Islands, and for a doubtful extent 

 beyond them to the north and west, form a sort 

 of belt, or zone, of Negrito population, interposed 

 between the Australians on the west and the in- 

 habitants of the great majority of the Pacific islands 



on the east. 

 179 



