3 14 Life and Immortality. 



Though it comprehends many divergent forms, yet they seem 

 to be all fundamentally connected, constituting a group entirely 

 isolated from any of the linguistic families of the other parts 

 of the world. Within its narrow confines the language is 

 well developed and sensuously copious and expressive. 



Like almost all other savages, the native Australians are 

 rapidly disappearing before the spread of civilization. The 

 European settlers crowd them out of all the more fertile and 

 habitable lands, pressing them more and more into the desert 

 of the interior, where they find it exceedingly hard to obtain 

 in their roving, unsettled lives the necessary means of sub- 

 sistence. Great numbers are thus forced to succumb to 

 deprivations not of their own bringing, and not a few 

 to the diseases and vices brought among them by the 

 new possessors of their domains. The lowest estimate of 

 their number, prior to the settlement of Europeans among 

 them, gives over 150,000, but the natives still surviving 

 scarcely figure one-half of that population. It is only a 

 question of a decade or two when the Australian, like the 

 Tasmanian, who was once his near neighbor, will have van- 

 ished from off the face of the country, leaving behind him 

 his implements of war and the chase, his culinary and 

 domestic apparatus, and the rude carvings of his hands in 

 caves and in rocks, as the principal evidences of his earthly 

 existence. 



By competent critics the Australian is pronounced to be 

 the most degraded of human beings, and the lowest type of 

 man. In reason, love, generosity, conscience and mere 

 responsibility he is the inferior of many of the lower ani- 

 mals, and in the erection of a house for comfort, shelter and 

 security he is surpassed by creatures even as low in the 

 scale as the worms and insects. It is true, when hunger has 

 to be met, that he has shown some skill in the manufacture 

 of implements necessary to the obtainment of his food, and 

 also in resisting the attacks of his own kind and of the nat- 

 ural enemies by which he is surrounded. There is no doubt 



