October 4, 1900] 



NATURE 



549 



naturally and easily. The experience of past generations makes 

 the acquisition of present experience easier, and so it comes 

 about that we cannot help seeing it. But it is all experience, 

 after all ; although learned philosophers, by long, long thinking 

 over the theory of groups and other abstruse high developments, 

 may perhaps come to what I think is a sort of self-deception, 

 and think that their geometry is pre-existent in themselves, 

 whilst nature's is only a bad copy. Like the old Indian 

 pundit, whose name was something like Bhatravistra, who, after 

 fifty years inward contemplation, discovered God ; — where — it 

 would not be polite to mention. Oliver Heaviside. 



September 22. 



The New Senate of the University of London. 



In your paragraph (Nature, September 27, p. 543) on the 

 new Senate about to be elected in the University of London, 

 you have put the issue as it has occurred to me. I have not 

 been able to give my support to either of the two bodies which 

 have set their electoral machinery in motion, for the simple 

 reason that neither of them has produced a list of names of 

 candidates in which higher educational work is adequately 

 represented. I thoroughly endorse your remark that " It would 

 be nothing less than a calamity were Convocation to elect 

 sixteen irreconcilables with no idea outside that of introducing 

 the peculiar needs of the external student into all deliberations 

 of the Senate." 



The University may boast of the value of the degree ; but 

 this is only to say that as an organism its cell-Xvio. is strong. As 

 an organism, however, its somatic life is weak ; and the summa- 

 tion and co-ordination of function is the main idea for the new 

 Senate of the University to keep before it, if the University is 

 to be a factor of real power in our national and imperial life in 

 the centuries to come. An experience as a teacher of over a 

 quarter of a century (Wellington College and Nottingham) 

 entitles me, I think, to speak on this matter. 



Bishop's Stortford, September 28. A. Irving. 



The Peopling of Australia, 



In the issue of Nature dated December 28, 1899, there 

 appeared a notice of my book, " Eaglehawk and Crow," from 

 the pen of Prof. A. C. Haddon. A copy did not reach me till 

 the end of February, and for that and other reasons which need 

 not be mentioned I delayed replying to the criticisms passed. 

 With your kind permission I shall now endeavour to meet the 

 principal objections raised to my work, with a desire of advanc- 

 ing, if even in a very small measure, our knowledge of Australian 

 ethnology. All ethnologists are agreed upon the difficulty of 

 the Australian problem, and no one who attempts to solve it 

 will be surprised at their agreement. 



I regret that, owing to my omitting to define my use of the 

 term Melanesian, Prof. Haddon misapprehended one of my 

 fundamental positions. In a note on page 5 I say, " Papuan 

 is applied, not in its narrowest application (dark New Guinean), 

 but as the equivalent of Melanesian, and is meant to include the 

 Tasmanian aborigines, &c." From this Prof. Haddon inferred 

 that I excluded the Papuans proper from my Papuan race. 

 Nothing was further from my intention. I included them as a 

 sub-race under the wider term Melanesian, as many writers have 

 done, as even the latest writer on the subject, Deniker, has done 

 in his " Races of Man," page 2S5, and elsewhere. The basis 

 of my ethnological position may be thus represented : — 



Papuan Proper. 



''\irR°'^"'""Mala„.,ia„ Proper. 



sian Race. 



T„^ : r, . r Primitive Australian. 



I asmanian Papuan. \ ™ 



^ (Tasmanian. 



This classification underlies my whole book. I confess that I 

 would now prefer to restrict the name Melanesian to the 

 Melanesians proper as less liable to ambiguity, but in making 

 Melanesian the general name I followed the lead of others 

 much more competent than I am. That I recognised the nar- 

 rower application of Papuan is evident from the above quotation 

 from page 5, and such a passage as the following shows that I 

 recognise Melanesians proper. "There are indications of 

 groups of Melanesians having reached Australia on the eastern 

 Queensland coast," page 73. Further, I invariably refer to 



NO. 1 6 14. VOL. 62] 



the Tasmanians as Papuans, with occasionally some such quali- 

 fying word as primitive. 



My solution of the Australian racial problem having received 

 the approval of Prof. Keane (" Ethnology," pp. 291-2), I may 

 state it briefly here. The now extinct Tasmanians represent the 

 primeval Australian aborigines. They were probably not a 

 pure race, but embraced Negrito and Papuan elements. At 

 the time of their arrival in Australia they probably occupied the 

 islands to the north, and their congeners were the first to occupy 

 Melanesia. Upon the primitive Papuans there was a strong 

 graft of what, for want of a better name, and following the 

 example of others, I have called " Dravidians," using this as a 

 term of convenience to indicate likeness to the people of 

 southern and central India. Then followed a further migra- 

 tion, in a desultory manner, of people of Malay stock ; the 

 precise locality whence these came is indeterminable, but I give 

 evidence of distinctly Sumatran influence in the north-west. 

 Concurrently, or subsequently, companies of Melanesians proper 

 and Papuans proper have mingled with the Australians on the 

 north and east of Queensland. 



The two earliest immigrations entered Australia from New 

 Guinea or neighbourhood. The population became distributed 

 by streams diverging from the base of Cape York Peninsula. 



When allowance has been made for Prof. Haddon's miscon- 

 ception of my use of the term Papuan, there is little more in 

 his notice that needs to be referred to, as he concedes my main 

 positions. 



Mr. S. II. Ray, having been invited by Prof. Haddon to offer 

 observations upon the linguistic part: of the work, criticised it in 

 a manner which seems to be unnecessarily caustic, fastening at- 

 tention upon petty points which he objected to, and ignoring the 

 main issues. He begins by asserting that I belong to a school 

 of Australian pseudo-philologists who believe that a likeness 

 of words in sound and meaning is a proof of common origin, 

 and this in spite of my explicit disavowal of such a position, 

 and my exposure of the unsoundness of it on page 44, where I 

 show that on such a principle the Australian languages might 

 be derived from the English. Having made so fair a start 

 . with a pttitio principii, by gross misrepresentation of my 

 statements, he proceeds to buttress his assertion. "We are 

 asked to believe," he continues, "that Malay immigrants, 

 presumably from various parts of the Archipelago, entered 

 Australia from the north, and wandering about the interior, 

 scattered 'astonishing relics' of the speech of one of their 

 sections all over the island continent." He is not asked to 

 believe any such ridiculous nonsense, and it is singularly dis- 

 ingenuous to say so in the face of my sober statements on 

 page 57, " Either the Malay inroad, if made at the north, took 

 place in long past ages, or now and again parties of Malays, 

 either from choice or necessity, landed and became naturalised 

 at various spots on the east, north and west, and modified 

 the speech of the people, first immediately round them, and 

 then landwards": and on page 61, "This last influx (the 

 Malay) may have come by several little rills, entering at 

 places widely apart and gradually losing themselves in the 

 life-lake." The "wandering about the interior" is a pure 

 invention of Mr. Ray's. When the universal practice of 

 exogamy is taken into account, along with the general pres- 

 sure and movement of people, language, customs, &c., from 

 north to south, my theory of Malay influence on the Austra- 

 lian people and language will be accepted as reasonable by 

 unprejudiced minds. In the Journal of the Anthropological 

 Institute for 1894-5, in a paper on "The Languages of 

 British New Guinea," this very Mr. Ray uses language, and 

 language alone, as a basis of classification for proving racial 

 distinctions and affinities and movements. I do not say that 

 this was an improper use of the linguistic argument, but it 

 differs from mine in this, that I rarely rely upon language 

 alone. I back up the linguistic evidence by that of other 

 ethnological characters. 



To come to particulars : my identifying a certain type of 

 Australian words for "Head" with the Malay "Kapala"is 

 objected to because " Kapala " is a word of Indian origin. But 

 the word has been current in Malay for five or six centuries, and 

 is in use in that very part of Sumatra from which, according to 

 my hypothesis, came the authors of the best Australian rock- 

 paintings. It is quite possible that I may be mistaken in 

 relating certain Australian words to " Kapala," but Mr. Ray's 

 ground of objection has little or no cogency. 



"Mama "and "bapa" are terms for mother and father of 



