REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 
` The Aborigines of North-West-Central Queensland. 1! — The Aus- 
tralian aborigines are now ranked by ethnographers as fifth or sixth 
in the list of so-called natural races, the Veddahs of Ceylon being 
the lowest in the scale of savage culture. A few Anglo-Australians 
have appeared as earnest champions of the “ Blacks,” but the supe- 
rior race commonly regards them as brutal and degraded, and the 
advent of the whites has been an even more disastrous event to the 
aborigines than in America. Disease, alcohol, and lead have rapidly 
reduced their numbers. A thorough and comprehensive study of the 
Australian tribes has never been attempted, and the information now 
obtainable from the miserable remnants of the race can afford us 
but an imperfect knowledge of their former condition. It is to be 
regretted, therefore, that such painstaking investigations as those of 
r. Roth were not made a century ago. The territory embraced in 
these £thnological Studies is designated North-West-Central Queens- 
land and lies beyond the region described by Lumholtz. 
The book contains 184 pages of text, about one-third of which is 
devoted to the language of the twelve tribes that occupy that portion 
of the colony. The elementary grammar and the list of words 
selected for tabular comparison from the various dialects supply a 
much better basis for further linguistic study than the meager vocab- 
ularies previously published from that quarter. A vocabulary of 
about 600 words of the Pitta-Pitta dialect is given and about 200 
more are included in the grammar. From the large number of vowel 
sounds we can easily believe the statements of other writers that the 
language is “ soft, vocalic, and melodious. 
We are led to infer that the sign-language is not very generally 
known to the whites, rather than that it is but rarely practised by the 
aborigines, as is stated by other writers. A recent authority declares 
that these northern tribes are more intelligent than those of South 
Australia. Another writer, however, asserts that the southern tribes 
are the more intelligent. The message sticks figured are inferior to 
those of East Australia. The remarkably complex nomenclature of 
1 Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines. 
By Walter E. Roth, Brisbane, Government Printer, 1897. 
