ORIGIN OF THE AUSTRALIAN RACE. 79 



I have alluded in a preceding* part of this work 

 (Vol. I. p. 232) to the circumstance that the small 

 vocabulary obtained at the Louisiade may, along- 

 with others, throw some lig'ht upon the question, 

 — whence has Australia been peopled ? 



It may safely be assumed that the aborigines of 

 the whole of Australia (exclusive of Van Diemen's 

 Land) have had one common orig'in ', in ph}' sical 

 character the natives of Cape York seem to me to 

 differ in no material respect from those of New 

 South Wales, South or Western Australia, or Port 

 Essing'ton,* and, I believe I am borne out by facts 

 in statino' that an examination of vocabularies and 

 g'rammars (more or less complete) from widely re- 

 mote localities, still further tends to prove the unity 

 of the Australian tribes as a race. 



* M. Hombron (attached to D'TJrville's last expedition as 

 surgeon and naturalist) considers — as the result of personal obser- 

 vation — that the aborigines of New South Wales exhibit certain 

 points of physical diiFerence from those of the North Coast of 

 Australia, meaning, I suppose, by the latter, those natives seen 

 by him at Raffles Bay and Port Essington. I may also mention 

 that M. Hombron considers the Northern Australians to be a 

 distinct sub-division of the Australian race, in which he also 

 classes the inhabitants of the smaller islands of Torres Strait (as 

 Warrior Island for instance) attributing the physical ameliora- 

 tion of the latter people to the fact of their possessing abun- 

 dant means of subsistence afforded by the reefs among which 

 they live, and the necessity of possessing well constructed canoes 

 as their only means of procuring fish and dugong, stated by him 

 to constitute the chief food of the Torres Strait islanders. — Voyage 

 an Pole Sud, &c. Zoologie, torn. i. par M. Hombron, p. 313, 

 314, 317. 



