72 THE TASMANIAN ABORIGINES. 



descriptive name of "duck bills." As these are 

 a}3parently of forms hitherto iinrecogfnised, it would 

 be interestina^ to have them examined. A few 

 weeks since I accompanied Mr. R. M. Johnston and 

 Mr. Morton on their examination of a native quarry, 

 which was discovered by Mr. Harold Bisdee on the 

 Hutton-park estate, near Melton Mowbray. We found 

 about an acre of ground covered with chippings of chert, 

 showing that it must have been for a very long period a 

 place resorted to by the aborigines for procuring their 

 stone implements. An interesting circumstance was that 

 we found a number of rounded nodules of greenstone 

 (mogtly broken) which had evidently been used by the 

 natives for splitting off the flakes of chert, that were 

 afterwards, by carefid chipping, shaped into stone axes 

 That the natives had stone implements other than those 

 commonly recognised as such, appears to be highly pro- 

 bable. Mr. Norton Smith has described to me large 

 stones, discovered by him on the North-West Coast, 

 which, in his opinion, bore evidence of human handiwork, 

 but for what purpose they were shaped was doubtful. 

 On our trip to Hutton-park Mr. Bisdee showed us an 

 interesting relic of the aborigines still standing near 

 Tedworth, Constitution Hill. This is a dead tree which 

 still bears the marks of the notches which the black 

 women were accustomed to make to assist them in 

 climbing for opossums. I believe Mr. Morton intends 

 to have this tree removed to the Museum. 



Origin. — The question of the origin of the Tasmanians 

 is still an open one. They appeared to belong to the 

 most pi-imeval races of mankind, and to be derived from 

 the same original stock as the Papuans and Melanesians. 

 Indeed, it has been suggested that from this primitive 

 stock (perhaps resembling the Mincopis of the Andaman 

 Islands), both the Melanesians on the one hand and the 

 African negroes on the other, took their origin. It is 

 surmised that they reached Tasmania by way of Aus- 

 tralia, and that this pala3olithic, woolly-haired negritic 

 stock onct peopled the whole Australian Continent, 

 until dispossessed, and probably annihilated, by the 

 present neolithic Australians, characterised by their 

 straight hair and the possession of ground stone imple- 

 ments, the boomerang, tbrowing-stick, and shield. But 



