PREFACE. 



AUSTRALIA has no part in the early history of the human race or in the develop- 

 ment of its civilization ; it contains no traces of ever having; been the seat of empire 

 no ruins, no mounds, to indicate that it was the dwelling-place, in the far past, of 

 industrious and fertile populations. Its great contributions to the world's store, material 

 and spiritual, will have to be the work of the future, and it already promises not to be 

 backward in the fulfillment of that obligation. To the student of physical science, it is 

 indeed a land full of interest, because, geologically, it is one of the oldest countries in 

 the world, and has suffered so little from submersion that the earlier types of the earth's 

 fauna and flora types found elsewhere only in the form of fossils can still be studied 

 in a living state. To the enthusiastic searcher after the footprints left in the march of 

 past ages, Australia furnishes, in its animal and vegetable life, records which are only 

 just beginning to be deciphered. To the student of ethnology, Australia offers little 

 but the customs of a few degraded tribes customs not materially differing from those 

 found elsewhere. For the student of comparative grammar, there is a variety of unde- 

 veloped dialects principally worth studying in order to determine to what branch of the 

 human family the Australian aborigines belong, and whence and when they migrated. 



That in early days Australia was not better peopled, and that its inhabitants never 

 rose above the elementary stage of acquiring a subsistence, and fashioning the rude tools 

 necessary thereto, is largely due to the aridity of the climate on all but the eastern 

 coast. Wherever man depends on the bounty of Nature, and has not learnt how to 

 cultivate and garner, there can be no advance in civilization if that bounty is capricious. 

 Australia is a land of uncertain rain-fall and of certain droughts, and its barbarous 

 tribes, dependent on the spontaneous produce of Nature, could not increase. When the 

 clouds are pitiless, the people perish unfed. The Australian aborigines were in this way 

 kept down, and never reached the point when they were able by human contrivance to 

 neutrali/e the precariousness of the earth's spontaneous supply of food. 



For this reason Australia, though populated for centuries, was a blank in history 

 until it was discovered by Europeans ; and, even when discovered, it was thought to be 

 of no value. Ardent and intrepid navigators, suspecting its existence, searched for and 

 found it, but the jewel when discovered was rejected as worthless. The Dutch might 

 have owned this Great Island Continent if they had thought it worth while to follow up 

 the discoveries of their seamen ; but though plenty of coast-line was traversed and 



