NOT EUGENESIC. 55 



good number of them in the Australian colonies, even if it 

 were true that the Whites have never formed a permanent alli- 

 ance with the native females. It can, however, not be doubted, 

 that more or less enduring- alliances have taken place between 

 the two races, namely, that many Whites have kept for months 

 and years Australian concubines under their roof. 1 This fact 

 positively results from the controversy raised by Count Strze- 

 lecki. This celebrated traveller, who has visited America and 

 Oceania, remarked that the native women, after having 1 once 

 lived with the white race, become sterile with the men of their 

 own race, though they may still be capable of becoming preg- 

 nant by white men. He asserts that he has collected hundreds 

 of such cases among the Hurons, Seminoles, Araucaiios, Poly- 

 nesians, and Melanesians. He does not attempt to explain 

 this strange phenomenon, which, he observes, is owing to some 

 mysterious law, and which appears to him to be one of the 

 causes of the rapid decay of indigenous populations in regions 

 occupied by Europeans. 2 



Mr. Alex. Harvey says that Professors Goodsir, Maunsel, 

 and Carmichael have, from various sources, ascertained that 

 Count Strzelecki's assertion is unquestionable, and must be 

 considered as the expression of a law of nature. 3 



M. de Strzelecki has not specified that the sterilisation of 

 the native females was the consequence of the procreation of 

 cross-breeds. He merely speaks of sexual relations in general; 

 and it appears to result from the text, that a native woman 

 who has cohabited for some time with a European, becomes 

 sterile in the intercourse with men of her own race, even if she 

 has not produced a child. 



It has, however, been assumed that this observer speaks 

 only of such women who have at least once been impregnated 



1 I cannot say whether this is also the case in Van Diemen's Land. The 

 subjoined documents have been collected in Australia since 1835, namely, at 

 a period when there were no longer any Tasmanians in Tasmania. M. de 

 Eienzi who had terminated his voyages before that time, said that the Tas- 

 manian women sometimes quitted their husbands to hive with the European 

 fishermen established on the coasts, L'Oceanie, t. iii, p. 547; this is, however, 

 an isolated fact. 



2 P. E. Strzelecki, Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Die- 

 men's Land, p. 346, London, 1845. 



3 Monthly Journal of Med. Science, Edinburgh, 1850, vol. xi, p. 304. 



