ON SECLUDED TRIBES OF UNCIVILIZED MEN. 331 



blessed with the cocoa-palm of the continent, and being in other 

 respects extremely unfertile, with hardly any quadrupeds existing 

 upon it, the inhabitants are often driven to straits, and pick up their 

 living to a great extent by traversing the sands and mud-banks in 

 search of shell-fish. An inspection of their feet would have de- 

 lighted the heart of Lamarck, whose development theory was that 

 the necessities of existence cause new developments of organs — 

 rasores being supplied with long and strong claws when they dis- 

 covered that their circumstances obliged them to scratch, and nata' 

 tores, by the continual expansion of their digits, being supplied with 

 webs when they found that they must swim for a living. So the 

 Andaman Islander has, at the present day, a foot most admirably 

 adapted to his position and labours on the yielding soil of the sea- 

 coast. The foot is exceedingly large, and the os calcis so greatly 

 exaggerated and projecting posteriorly, that, favoured still further 

 by the lightness of his body, he can safely traverse surfaces into 

 which an ordinary mortal would sink. His cranial type is not by 

 any means low. These people have the usual spindle-shanks of ill- 

 developed men, but the length of the limbs is proportionate to that 

 of the body. Their couches are like the lairs of the Bushmen. 

 They do not trouble themselves with any clothing, and they have a 

 community of wives. Professor Owen regards them as at the lowest 

 point in the scale of humanity. He states that they have no notion 

 of a Deity, of a future state, or of spiritual beings. But this asser- 

 tion, as Mr. Bruce very justly remarks, is not easily proved. "We 

 usually find that the most degraded savages have some idea of the 

 existence of spirits good or bad. At a meeting of a scientific soci#ty 

 lately held in Sydney, I perceive, by the report of proceedings, a 

 similar assertion made concerning some of the Australian aborigines 

 was stoutly denied upon good authority. 



The Andaman Islanders are a comparatively ancient tribe. They 

 are stated by Ptolemy to be cannibals, but this charge, though re- 

 peated by Marco Polo, and by so eminent an authority as Dr. Latham, 

 has been found to be incorrect. They may, as has been the case with 

 other tribes, even of superior races, been driven to cannibalism on a 

 rare occasion, through danger of imminent starvation, but the eating 

 of human flesh is not their regular practice. The population is about 

 two thousand, and is kept down by checks as severe as even Malthus 

 himself could desire. They have no regular social organization, but 

 live in gangs. 



