704 STONE AGE BASIS FOR ORIENTAL STUDY. 



without altering our conception of human nature, to suppose the rude 

 ancestors of the savages to have habitually edged their chopping-stoues 

 on both sides, and given up this for the one-edged flake, for many pur- 

 poses mucli less effective. Not less instructive is the fact that the Tas- 

 manians were not known to fix their chopping-stones in any kind of 

 handle, but only to grasp them in their bare hands. What was the 

 practice in this lespect among the Europeans of the Mammoth i)eriod 

 is not yet (juire conclusively known. Some ot their tools or weapons 

 were obvnjiisly made for grasping in the hand. Others may have been 

 fixed to wooden hafts, though it is hardly proven that they actually 

 were. At any rate, the Tasiimnian exam])le warns us iiot to rely on the 

 argument that to i)nt a handle to a hatchet inust have suggested itself 

 naturally to the lowest savages, for it seems not to ha\ e suggested itself 

 to Tasmanians. When they saw the European hatchet and how to use 

 It, they "were transported with joy.' and took to it at once. If their 

 ancestors, liavnig fixed their chipi)ed stones m withes or boughs, after- 

 wards held them in their naked hands instead, man is a less intelligent 

 animal than other experience of him would a\ arrant. Even if it should 

 prove by further quest that stone implements of higher finish, say equal 

 to the Australian, occur in the ground or were made by the Tasma- 

 nians, this would not much alter the inferences as to their culture-his- 

 tory, but would still leave the Tasmanians as a people actually seen in 

 modern times to pursue their life on a Paleolithic footing under cir- 

 cumstances where Neolithic man would have pra(;tised his higher art. 

 We can hardly overestimate the anthropological importance of this 

 negroid race, whose grievous extirpation so sadly clouds our colonial his- 

 tor3\ in the light of tliese facts Paleolithic man ceases to be a mystery, 

 now tliat we can see the portraits and examine the life of his far P^ast- 

 ern counterpart They enable us to realize, at least in vague outline, 

 a state ol man in geological antiquity which has lasted on into modern 

 life. It is most instructive to examine what the condition of these mod- 

 ern Paleolithic people was in other respects, and the labors of Mr. Ling 

 Rotii, who has collected ill a single volume (" The Tasnidnians"' London, 

 bS90) almost every scrap of record, puts it before the world in a i)ic- 

 ture which, considering how much of the evidence comes irom unedu- 

 cated witnesses, is on the whole remarkably consistent. Of savage 

 tribes not in a state of decay, the Tasmanians may be reckoned among 

 the lowest known. Their want of art in stone impleuientniaking agreed 

 with their condition as to other weapons and tools. They had no boAv 

 and arrow, like that of their Australian neighbors, no throwing-stick 

 to burl their spears, and their spears, though they seem to have known 

 how to point them with a human bone, were usually long sticks 

 straightened by bending, and the points of which had been thrust into 

 the fire and sharpened. These, and wad^lies or clubs tolerably Rlia{>ed, 

 were their weapons of the chase and war. They had not even the 

 rude bark canoe of the Australians, but a canoe-like raft ot rolls of 



