730 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 
Some of the writers whose opinions I have quoted have either 
stated in so many words, or have left it to be inferred by their 
statements, that the Tasmanians reached this continent by canoe 
or ship. 
But there is not a tittle of evidence in support of the belief that 
the Tasmanians ever were acquainted with the art of constructing 
a canoe able to cross such a sea strait as that between Tasmania 
and Australia, much less wider extents of ocean. On the con- 
trary the whole of their culture was on a par with the rudeness of 
the bark rafts. 
T have long since come to the conclusion that one of the funda- 
mental principles to be adopted in discussing the origin of those 
savages must be that they reached Tasmania at a time when there 
was a land communication between it and Australia. 
It is only in the work of Professor Giglioli that I have found 
this clearly seen, where he says that there is no instance recorded 
of a people who have lost the art of navigation which they had 
once acquired.* 
The Australians have also by most authors been credited with 
arriving in canoes or ships on the coasts of Australia. 
But I am quite unable to understand how, since these authors 
picture them as settling down upon and then spreading along the 
coasts, they should have lost the art of constructing sea-going 
canoes, which would be as necessary to them as to the southern 
seacoast tribes of New Guinea or to the islanders of Torres 
Straits of the present time. There is no evidence of such a 
degeneration in culture, and before this belief can be accepted as 
a settled proposition some evidence in support of it must be forth- 
coming. 
It might however be urged that the tribes living on the east 
coast of Cape York Peninsula and of the Australian coast of 
Torres Straits, as far as Port Darwin, are acquainted with and 
use outrigger canoes, and therefore may represent the condition 
of the first arrivals. On this the observations of the earlier navi- 
gators, and especially of those engaged in surveying voyages, are 
much to the point. 
Mr. McGillivray, speaking of the year 1847,} says that the 
canoes seen in Rockingham Bay were constructed of a single 
sheet of bark brought together at the ends and secured by 
stitching. Near Shelburne Bay, on the east side of Cape York 
Peninsula, they were constructed of a tree trunk with a double 
outrigger, “‘and altogether a poor instance of those used by the 
islanders of Torres Straits.” Further on, when at Cape York, 
he speaks of the ordinary outrigger canoe of the Straits, and of 
® xxir, p. 146. + XXXVIII, pp. 81, 119, 125. 
