PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS, 749 
To connect the Australians with the Dravidians in the manner 
commonly done seems to entirely overlook some essential elements 
of the problem. These appear to require that the original parent 
stock of the former must have existed far back in prehistoric or 
even in Pleistocene time, when the physical geography of the 
Asiatic and Austral continents and the racial character and dis- 
tribution of the peoples inhabiting them must have very materi- 
ally differed from those of the present time. 
_ Therefore, any ethnical or linguistic connection between the 
Australians and the Dravidians must be considered to be the 
relationship merely of two tribes co-descendant from a common 
and distant ancestral stock. 
I should be most unwilling to appear to underrate the great 
services which the science of phylology is capable of rendering to 
anthropology ; but it must be admitted that its professors are, 
unfortunately, not always possessed of that scientific caution 
which is so essential in all ethnological .or anthropological 
inquiries. In Europe this has been shown by the results of the 
Aryan controversy ; and it is sincerely to be hoped that no 
analogous results may be experienced here through attempts 
to solve the Australian problem by the aid of philology alone. 
That science is merely one of the components of the compre- 
hensive science of anthropology, and is, therefore, incapable of 
' being a safe guide alone when attempting a solution of so com- 
plicated a problem as the origin of the aborigines of Tasmania 
and Australia. 
The various provisional conclusions to which I have so far 
been led, will now admit of my advancing a step further in this 
inquiry and to attempt to indicate what appears to be the most 
probable source from which the Tasmanians and Australians have 
come. 
Of all the attempted solutions of this problem, that which has 
been offered by Sir W. H. Flower and Mr. R. Lydekker* appears 
to me most nearly to fit in with the requirements of this case. 
They suggest that Australia was originally peopled by frizzly- 
haired Melanesians, such as the Tasmanians, but that there was 
a strong infusion of some other race,-probably a low form of 
Caucasian Melanochroi. As to the identification of the Tasman- 
lans with the Melanesians, the following may be applicable :— 
Mr. H. Ling Roth has recorded certain conclusions, based upon 
the mass of data collected and discussed by him in his work on 
the Aborigines of Tasmania. Among others there is one which 
may be well accepted as agreeing with the weight of evidence, 
namely—that the Tasmanians were more closely related to the 
Andaman islanders than to any other race.{ 
* xx, p. 748. { XLVII, p. 351. 
