Miscellanede 1838 
and the aborigines of any country on the other, are generally des- 
tined to become the dominant population of those countries. For, 
on the one hand, these “half casts” very commonly combine the 
best attributes of the two races from whose admixture they sprang ; 
namely, the intelligence and mental activity of the European, and 
the climatic adaptation of the native,* and they are also in general 
distinguished for their fertility, when paired with each other, so 
that they are rapidly rising into numerical importance. On the 
other hand, this very intermixture, taking place as it usually does 
between an European father and a native mother, tends to diminish 
the number of the native population in a very remarkable manner ; 
for there is now a large amount of evidence, that when a native 
female of the American or Polynesian races has once been impreg- 
nated by an European male, she thenceforth loses all power of 
conception from intercourse with the male of her ownrace. This 
was first pointedly stated by that very intelligent traveller, the 
Count de Strzelecki, who has lived much among different races of 
aborigines, the natives of Canada, of the United States, of California, 
Mexico, the South American Republics, the Marquesas, Sandwich 
and Society Islands, New Zealand, and Australia, and who affirms 
that in hundreds of cases of this kind into which he has enquired, 
and of which he preserves memoranda, there has not been a single 
exception. { 
As regards Australia and New Zealand, this statement, strange 
as it seems at first sight, has been fully borne out by independent 
evidence ; + and it offers the most complete explanation yet given, of 
the very rapid decrease in the native population of the various 
islands of Oceania, in which European races have been long estab- 
lished.—Dr. Carpenter. 
AUSTRALIAN BuLimi. 
Of the Bulimi of Australia little is at present known. One species, 
B. atomatus, with a large dark-coloured inflated shell, has been 
collected at Port Macquarie; one small species, B. trilineatus, at 
Port King George; and two, B. Kingit and inflatus, of which the 
precise locality is unknown. Two species with thin dusky shells, 
B.meloand Dufresnii, inhabiting Van Diemen’s Land, constitute the 
southern limit of the genus in the eastern hemisphere.—Ann. and 
Mag. of Nat. Hist. April, 1851. 
* This is well seen in the case of the descendants of the mutineers of the 
Bounty and of Tahitian women, who now occupy Pitcairn’s Island. 
+ [Remarkable as Count Strzelecki’s observations usually are for their great 
accuracy, the law here so broadly enunciated is not without its exceptions; for 
there is now living at the Tasmanian Aborigines’ establishment, at Oyster Cove, 
a native black woman of Tasmania, who, when young, bore black children to her 
Native husband,—then several ‘half casts,” of whom, two grown-up women are 
now alive; and, finally, two or three black children (one of whom is now a 
fine boy about nine years old) by a black countryman, to whom she was 
united upon being removed from her European protector.—J. M. ] 
¢ See the Count de Strzelecki’s Physical Description of New South Wales 
and Van Diemen’s Land, p. 345-347. 
