THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 



advancing stronger and lethally armed northern arctogeal stocks. He is already 

 extinct through that agency in Tasmania ; reduced to his last and most pitiful 

 conditions of existence in Victoria and the Europeanised districts of the adjacent 

 colonies ; and it is only in the far north and in areas unsuited for the white man's 

 occupation that he still retains his primaeval habits and naturally robust physique. 



That the Australian aboriginal represents a race entirely distinct from the 

 inhabitants of New Zealand, New Guinea, or any of the Indo-Malay islands is self- 

 evident to anyone having had the advantage of personal contact with members of these 

 several races. Even in the case of Papua or New Guinea, with whom an alliance 

 might be most reasonably anticipated, it has been pointed out by Dr. A. R. Wallace 

 that the roots of their respective dialects, a most important diagnostic character, are 

 essentially distinct. Among the notable points of divergence exhibited by the Australian 

 aborigines, as compared with the most contiguous races, those relating to their devel- 

 opment of the arts of navigation and the manufacture of war or hunting weapons, 

 are particularly prominent. 



Navigation as practised by the coastal Australian tribes is of the most primitive 

 description, exhibiting in this association a striking contrast with the Malay and 

 Papuan races, who are expert sailors .and boat builders. The aboriginal Tasmanians 

 apparently forswore the sea and possessed no floating craft whatever. Among the 

 Southern Australian tribes, in the wider sense, nothing in advance of a floating log, 

 used in still waters for fishing purposes, has been recorded. On the Eastern, Queens- 

 land coast, and in the neighbourhood of the Palm Islands more especially, rough 

 canoes, rarely capable of holding more than two people, are fashioned out of single 

 sheets of bark stripped from the larger Eucalypti, and dexterously fastened together at 

 the two extremities. Higher up the same coast we meet with dug-out canoes having 

 the typical Malay and Papuan outrigger. The form has been most undoubtedly 

 borrowed from the Papuan, and is indeed most frequently derived directly from 

 Papuan sources ; a trade in which these canoes form an important factor being carried 

 on between New Guinea and the Torres Straits Islands, whence they filter through to 

 North Queensland. 



The North- Western, Kimberley or King's Sound, district of Western Australia, 

 undoubtedly produces the most distinctive type of native craft. This consists of a 

 triangular raft made from poles of the indigenous " Cyprus Pine," apparently identical 

 with Frenella robusta, fastened together with wooden pegs, and supplemented at the 

 wider end by a few vertically affixed sticks, upon or between which the successful 



