8 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 
advancing stronger and lethally armed northern arctogeal stocks. He is already 
extinct through that agency in Tasmania; reduced to his last and most pitiful 
conditions of existence in Victoria and the Europeanised districts of the adjacent 
colonies; and it is only in the far north and in areas unsuited for the white man’s 
occupation that he still retains his primeval habits and naturally robust physique. 
That the Australian aboriginal represents a race entirely distinct from the 
inhabitants of New Zealand, New Guinea, or any of the Indo-Malay islands is self- 
evident to anyone having had the advantage of personal contact with members of these 
several races. Even in the case of Papua or New Guinea, with whom an alliance 
might be most reasonably anticipated, it has been pointed out by Dr. A. R. Wallace 
that the roots of their respective dialects, a most important diagnostic character, are 
essentially distinct. Among the notable points of divergence exhibited by the Australian 
aborigines, as compared with the most contiguous races, those relating to their devel- 
opment of the arts of navigation and the manufacture of war or hunting weapons, 
are particularly prominent. 
Navigation as practised by the coastal Australian tribes is of the most primitive 
description, exhibiting in this association a striking contrast with the Malay and 
Papuan races, who are expert sailors and boat builders. The aboriginal Tasmanians 
apparently forswore the sea and possessed no floating craft whatever. Among: the 
Southern Australian tribes, in the wider sense, nothing in advance of a floating log, 
used in still waters for fishing purposes, has been recorded. On the Eastern, Queens- 
land coast, and in the neighbourhood of the Palm Islands more especially, rough 
canoes, rarely capable of holding more than two people, are fashioned out of single 
sheets of bark stripped from the larger Eucalypti, and dexterously fastened together at 
the two extremities. Higher up the same coast we meet with dug-out canoes having 
the typical Malay and Papuan outrigger. The form has been most undoubtedly 
borrowed from the Papuan, and is indeed most frequently derived directly from 
Papuan sources; a trade in which these canoes form an important factor being carried 
on between New Guinea and the Torres Straits Islands, whence they filter through to 
North Queensland. 
The North-Western, Kimberley, or King’s Sound, district of Western Australia, 
undoubtedly produces the most distinctive type of native craft. This consists of a 
triangular raft made from poles of the indigenous “Cyprus Pine,” apparently identical 
with Frenella robusta, fastened together with wooden pegs, and supplemented at the 
wider end by a few vertically affixed sticks, upon or between which the successful 
