BY JAMES Backhouse walker, f.r.g.s. 67 



excellent and valuable as is the "Daily Life" as a popu- 

 lar and readable account of our native tribes in their 

 original state, it cites no authorites, and does not pretend 

 to strict scientific precision. Brough Smyth's account 

 is more critical, but it is meagre. 



When, therefore, in 1890, Mr. H. Ling Roth published 

 his work, " The Aborigines of Tasmania," he did no 

 inconsiderable service to anthropology. Mr. Roth 

 devoted infinite pains to ransacking in every likely corner, 

 so as to gather together every scrap of first-hand infor- 

 mation, no matter how fragmentary, about the aborigines. 

 At the end of his book he gives a list of some 114 works, 

 from which he has made extracts. These extracts he 

 has carefully digested and arranged according to subject, 

 Avith references to the original authorities in all cases. 

 The result is that the student has before him, in a care- 

 fully systematised form, everything that is known about 

 the Tasmanian Tribes, and one's first feeling is one of 

 surprise that so much information could have been got 

 together. The first edition was rapidly exhausted, 

 and soon commanded a greatly enhanced price. 

 For the last nine years Mr. Roth has been engaged 

 in making further inquiries and searches, and has 

 during that time been able to amass a considerable 

 amount of new matter, and to correct a number of defects 

 in the book. He has now issued a new edition, hand- 

 somely illustrated, and in it we have at last a complete 

 scientific account of our native tribes derived from the 

 original first-hand sources. The work is faithfully and 

 conscientiously done, and the book is in every respect an 

 admirable one. It throws a new light on the aborigines 

 and adds largely to our knowledge of them, enabling us 

 to fix more accurately than has hitherto been possible, 

 their place in the scale of humanity. 



Mr. Roth's method of bringing together into a 

 focus all the various statements with respect to any one 

 subject is of great value, since it enables us to weigh 

 these statements against each other, and, in so doing, to 

 reject not a little which is either plainly erroneous or not 

 supported by adequate evidence. This process of 

 elimination has an interesting result. It tends to 

 strengthen our idea of the extraordinarily low state of 

 development which our Tasmanian natives had reached. 



