702 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
owing simply to the comparative thinness and lightness of the 
Australian weapon. All who have witnessed its employment by 
the natives, concur in sayingsthat it has a random range in its 
return flight. Any one who will take the trouble to practise with 
the different forms of this weapon, will perceive that the essential 
principle of the boomerang, call it by whatever name you please, 
consists in its bent and flat form, by means of which it can be 
thrown with a rotatory movement, thereby increasing the range 
and flatness of the trajectory. I have practised with the boome- 
rangs of different nations. I made a fac simile of the Egyptian 
boomerang in the British Museum, and practised with it for some 
time upon’Wormwood Scrubs, and I found that in time I could 
increase the range from fifty to one hundred paces, which is much 
farther than I could throw an ordinary stick of the same size with 
accuracy. I also succeeded in at last obtaining as light return of 
flight ; in fact it flies better than many Australian boomerangs, for 
they vary considerably in size, weight and form, and many will 
not return when thrown. The efficacy of the boomerang consists 
entirely in the rotation, by means of which it sails up to a bird 
upon the wing and knocks it down with its rotating arms; bi! 
few of them have any twist in their construction. The stories 
about hitting an object with accuracy behind the thrower are 
nursery tales; but a boomerang, when thrown over a river or 
swamp will return and be saved. .... To deny the affinity of 
the Australian and Dravidian or Egyptian boomerang on account 
of the absence of a return flight would be the same as denying: 
the affinity of two languages whose grammatical construction br 
the same because of their differing materially in their vocabularies. 
— From the Address of Col. Fox before the Anthrdpological Section 
of the British Assoc. Adv. Sci., Aug., 1872, in “ Nature.” 
Antiquity or Man in France.— The International eee" 
of Anthropology and: prehistoric Archeology held its sixth jost 
ing at Brussels in August last. The editor of “La Revue 
= i i ium 
tifique ” thus notices what had been done in France and pos 
to establish the high antiquity of man. ‘ Indeed, if pn 
there was announced for the first time in 1829, by three 
geologists, De Christol, Tournal and Emilieu Dumas, the 3 
ing proposition that man was living at, the same time as the ; 
animals of lost species whose bones fill the soil of caves; 
stound- 
if it 
