Art. VII. — liemarks on a Fossil Implement and Bones 

 of an Extinct Kangaroo. 



By C. W. De vis, M.A. 



(With Plate VII.). 



fRead 8th June, 1899.1 



All who have given intelligent thought to the history of 

 Australia in the past, onward from the time of her greatest 

 amplitude of animal life, have doubtless marvelled to find that 

 of antique man no traces, such as are frequent in most other 

 regions of the earth, have been discovered on or beneath her 

 surface. In search of her material wealth that surface has been 

 explored over a great part of its extent and proved to all reason- 

 able depths, yet not a bone, not a handiwork of the most 

 imperishable nature, to which a geological or even archsieo- 

 logical interest can really attach, has been brought to light. 

 We have nothing to clearly demonstrate man's existence in the 

 land while its superficial features were in course of modification, 

 nothing to suggest that the legendary lore of the Aborigine 

 may be something more than the spontaneous creation of 

 savages without a local history. Had such relics been extant 

 we should almost necessarily have read in them, so far as we 

 could read aught in them, the history of the forefathers of 

 the so called Aborigines. The want of them has had this 

 consequence, that the Australian " Negroid " has been pretty 

 generally assumed to be a forlorn alien — an involuntary immi- 

 grant into unoccupied territory in comparatively recent times, 

 and in the asserted absence of signs of kinship with nearer 

 neighbours, has been pronounced by authority, more or less 

 reliable, to be genetically related to various distant races, 

 notably to the Dravidian Hill Tribes of India. Perhaps it is 

 not too venturesome to hint that speculation of the kind has 

 led to no satisfactory conclusion ; the coincidences of word 

 and grammar, and even of skull-characters, have not carried 

 conviction to the mind — that in point of fact the derivation 



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