PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 373^ 



attended tlie International Congress of Anthropology and Pre- 

 historic Archeology at Geneva, and the 15th International Congress 

 on Hygiene at Washington, and the 21st Annual Meeting of 

 Military Sui-geons of the United States at Baltimore ; and I have 

 enjoyed the great privilege of being in the company of scientific 

 men, professional men, and experts in various trades and industries 

 in Great Britain, Europe, and America. As an Australian,. 

 accredited by the Government, I was an object of some interest,, 

 and the subject of a good deal of investigation. I was glad that 

 my somewhat varied work, or pastimes, and my diverse interests 

 during sixteen years in Australia, had supplied me with materials 

 for answering the many and varied questions put to me by indivi- 

 duals, or raised for friendly scientific discussion in company or at 

 meetings. The questions were such as wovild naturally arise con- 

 cerning a country with old rocks, ancient fauna and flora, a 

 primitive aboriginal race, and a white poi^ulation foreign to the 

 soil, now working out its destiny in new and strange surroundings.. 



Anthropologists wished to know the results of recent study in 

 respect to the unity or mixture of our aboriginal stock, a subject 

 originally studied by Huxley, later by John Mathew, Turner, 

 and others; and we discussed the subject of specific or 

 luimistakable or crucial race-characters (and failed to find any), 

 and the bearing of certain facts regarding half-caste aboriginals 

 and Maoris, that were of great interest from the point of view of 

 the theory of the Caucasian origin of these races. The subject of 

 body scars took us back to Hippocrates and Paulus --S^genita, and 

 to a study of customs generally that had persisted in changed or 

 unchanged form, while the reason of their existence was forgotten 

 or only felt sub-conscioi;sly. Discussions on art embraced palaeo- 

 lithic art in Europe, the investigations of Campbell and others in 

 New South Wales and elsewhere, the relation of child art to savage 

 art, and the subject of whether our aboriginal possesses tlie 

 " camera-eye," as I had concluded, he does, in the same way as a 

 Fi'ench antliropologist had found independently among certain 

 European races or tribes. Questions were asked about the peoples 

 in the South Seas and the various migrations, and I was able to 

 supplement the recent work of Percy Smith, Macmillan Brown, 

 and otliers, regarding these migrations, and to give an account of 

 the first material evidence, made available by Mr. Eraser, of 

 Whangarei, corroborating a widely spread tradition that the 

 Melanesians had readied New Zealand before the arrival of the 

 Maoris. Inquiries into the numbers of our aboriginal population 

 led to discussions on race mixtures, and the results of such, on 

 depopulation generally, and the physical and moral havoc made in 

 particular instances, e.g., Fiji, Australia, and New Hebrides, by 

 well-intentioned interference with native habits and customs that 



