314 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 
