PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 123 
Section F. 
ETHNOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
By A. W. Howirr, F.G.S., and Corresponding Member of the 
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Anthropo- 
logical Society of Washington, U.S.A. 
(Delivered Saturday, January 8, 1898.) 
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE ABORIGINES OF TASMANIA 
AND AUSTRALIA. 
THE subject of my address has received the attention of many 
writers, who have attempted its solution, not by direct evidence, 
which, from the nature of the case, is not existant, but by infer- 
ences drawn from language, from custom, from the physical 
characters of the savages of Tasmania and Australia, and also, I 
regret to say, apparently out of the imagination of some writers 
as to what they assume must have been the facts. 
Before entering upon the conclusions to which I have been led 
in this inquiry, it will be well to note in chronological order the 
views of various authorities :— 
Mr. R. H. Davis* considered the Tasmanians to be scions of 
the Australians, and that their ancestors, being driven to sea in a 
canoe from the vicinity of King George’s Sound, would, by the 
prevailing winds and currents, be apt to reach the western part 
of Van Diemen’s Land. He selected that point of departure 
apparently for the reason that the word for “water” among the 
western tribes of Tasmania is similar to that used by the natives 
of Cape Loeuen. 
In 1839, Captain Robert Fitzroy,t in his narrative of the 
surveying voyages of the “Adventure” and the “ Beagle,” between 
the years 1826 and 1836, attributes the origin of the aborigines 
of Tasmania and Australia either to a party of negroes who might 
* XII. 7 xIx, vol. 1, p. 654 
