Antiquiti/ of Man in Victoria. 139 



were originally a negroid race, of which the Tasnmnians are the 

 only historic representatives. It is thought that the members of 

 this race crossed Australia as far as Tasmania, wherein some of 

 them were isolated by the formation or enlargement of Bass 

 Straits. Australia was then invaded by a race of black Caucas- 

 ians, who intermixed with the negroid occupants of the conti- 

 nent, and the Australian aborigines were the offspring of this 

 mixture. The negroid people were thus replaced in Australia, 

 but survived in Tasmania. According to this theory we should 

 expect Victoria to have been occupied by members of the primi- 

 tive Tasmanian race, which became extinct long before the arri- 

 val of the recent aborigines. Hence, men of the Tasmanian race 

 may have lived during the volcanic period, and yet all traditions 

 and place-names founded on the eruptions may have been lost. 

 If the aborigines had overlapped with the Tasmanian people, the 

 few doubtful traditions previously quoted, might be regarded as 

 the distorted fragments of information, which the present abori- 

 gines obtained from their predecessors. 



We have, therefore, to consider whether the Buninyong 

 implement, for that is the only one worth considering, may 

 have belonged to a pre-aboriginal Tasmanian race. The 

 Tasmanian stone implements were of a ruder type than those 

 of the Australians; they were merely chipped and never ground, 

 and apparently they were not used in handles. From their 

 shape they have been described by Professor E. B. Tylor as 

 quasi-palaeolithic. Mr. Ivenyon tells me that, though he has 

 searched carefully in the hope of finding beds in Victoria 

 containing only roughly chipped implements, which cannot be 

 distinguished from those made by the Tasmanians, he has found 

 none. 



The only area on the mainland of Australia, where implements 

 occur which resemble the Tasmanian, is in Westralia. Thus, 

 according to Brough Smyth, the typical implement in that area 

 "is ruder in its fashioning, owing principally t6 the material of 

 which it is compo.sed, than even the rude unrubbed chipped 

 cutting-stones of the Tasmanians."^ Professor Tylor'^ and Mr. 



1 Smyth, Brough: "Aborigines of Victoria," vol. i., London, 1878, p. 340. 



2 Taylor, E. B.: "On the Survival of Palaeolithic Conditions in Tasmania and 

 Australia." Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci., 1898, p. 1015. 



