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Avhy it is advanced that these contributions have a greater 

 ethnological value, from an Australian point of view, than other 

 important studies made to the west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, 

 the Daly River, and other parts of the coastal region of the 

 Northern Territory, is that the tribes in Central and Southern 

 Australia are less likely to be mixed with other races. And one 

 of the greatest points of interest in connection with the study of 

 the aborigines of Australia would be that here, if anywhere, it 

 should be possible to investigate perhaps one of the purest 

 examples of a race that is autochthonic as contrasted to exotic in 

 its local origin. In other words, in studying the purest examples 

 of the Australian aborigines, the scientific investigator would be 

 studying as purely local productions as would be found in the 

 respective flora and fauna. The isolation of the Central and 

 Southern parts of Australia from other centres of human occupa- 

 tion, the absence of rivers or other easy modes of transit, and the 

 background of a vast uninhabited ocean, presents a habitat that 

 is unique in the completion of its severance from the rest of the 

 world or from any invading influences. So that whatever 

 aflinities the aborgines of Australia may have as a race with 

 certain black Hill Tribes of Southern India or Papuans or Negritos 

 of the Archipelagos to the east of Australia, they would still 

 present a study from an isolation point of view vastly superior 

 to any that could be obtained in any other country, or under any 

 other existing conditions with which we are acquainted. Mr. 

 Romanes attaches very great importance to the effects of isolation 

 and devotes part III. of his work " Darwin and after Darwin" 

 chiefly to a discussion of the varieties and bearings of isolation in 

 modifying forms of life. " In isolation," he says, " we have a 

 principle so fundamental and so universal that even the great 

 principle of natural selection is less deep, and pervades a region 

 of smaller extent." Isolation is defined as the prevention of 

 intercrossing between a separate section of a species or kind and 

 the rest of that species or kind ; whether such separation be due 

 to geographical barriers, to migration, or to any other state of 

 matters leading to exclusive breeding within the separated group. 

 This application of isolation to the aborigines of Central and 

 Southern Australia has been particularly fortunate, as there is 

 reason to believe that the Australian race is amongst the most 

 primitive known, and the most direct issue of the primitive stock 

 from which the various races bordering the greater part 

 of the Indian Ocean may possible have been sprung in 

 the remote past. If this should be the case with the 

 aborigines of Australia it would tend to show that 

 isolation must have an injurious efl'ect on the development or the 

 evolution upwards of any particular species. It is not difficult to 



