PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. yas)! 
stock might have given the characters of the hair to the other- 
wise negroid primitive inhabitants of Australia, and also certain 
peculiarities of feature which are occasionally observed, and 
which are evidently and certainly not negroid in character. 
I have before said, and desire again to repeat, that the conclu- 
sions to which I have been led as to the origin of the Tasmanians 
and Australians, necessarily demand a vast antiquity on the Aus- 
tralian continent for the former and even a very long period 
of at least prehistoric time for the latter. 
There has been much hesitation in accepting any great antiquity 
for man in Australia, Mr. R. Brough Smyth* pointed out as 
far back as 1878, that in the hundreds of square miles of alluvial 
deposits which have been turned over by miners in Victoria very 
few aboriginal stone hatchets have been found, and there even at 
inconsiderable depths below the surface. Since that time, how- 
ever, evidence has been forthcoming which may be held to 
probably assign nan in Australia into Post-Tertiary, perhaps into 
Pleistocene times. 
It may be well, therefore, to bring together those instances 
which have come under my notice in order that the evidence 
from these sources may be seen concisely in one view. 
Mr. Bonwicky records the discovery of a “stone tool” by 
miners at Ballarat, 22 inches below the surface, in a place which 
had not been before disturbed. The author, however, according to 
his practice, gives no reference to his authority. 
Dr. A. R. Wallace has communicated to me, for the purpose of 
investigation, the discovery in 1855, of an axehead of basalt at 
Maryborough, in Victoria, by Mr. A. C. Swinton, who was at the 
time engaged in mining. 
Mr. Swinton says that he and Mr. M. C. Shore were sinking a 
shallow shaft on a small tributary leading into the main lead, when 
at a depth of about four feet from the surface and one foot from the 
bottom, Mr. Shore drove his pick into an axehead made of basalt. 
The shaft was sunk through cemented gravel with three false 
bottoms, and about half way down there was a hard band of 
cement. 
By the courtesy of Mr. James Travis, the acting Secretary for 
Mines and Water Supply, Mr. Stanley Hunter, one of the 
officers of the Geological Survey, examined the place referred to 
by Mr. Swinton, and marked by him upon a parish plan of Mary- 
borough. 
Mr. Hunter reported to the effect that the tributary referred 
to by Mr. Swinton is one of the heads of the main Bet Bet lead, 
and as that lead is covered by Pleistocene basalt the lower strata 
in the contributary lead in question may be of the same age. Yet 
* XLIX, vol. I, p. 364 f iv. 
