344 PRINCIPAL SIR WILLIAM TURNER ON 



Oceanic islands lying to the north and east of the Australian continent. Since it 

 was published an important link in the chain of evidence has been supplied in the dis- 

 covery by the English and Dutch explorers in the mountains of West New Guinea 

 of a pygmy race possessing undoubted Negrito characters (p. 324). It has therefore 

 been established that Negritos continue to occupy limited tracts in the mountains 

 of that island, though the country generally is now mostly populated by the more 

 virile Papuans. The descriptions by Captain Rawling, Mr Wollaston, and Messrs 

 de Kock and v. d. Broek # have satisfactorily established the physical differences 

 between the Pygmies and the Papuans, and it is clear that up to the present day a 

 characteristic Negrito race has been preserved in the great island to the immediate 

 north of Australia. 



16. The possibility, therefore, of the extension of Negritos throughout Australia, 

 before its southern end had become an island separated by the Straits of Bass, has been 

 accentuated by this fact. The fauna of Tasmania, as regards many species, is identical 

 with that of Australia. The human element, when Tasmania was discovered, was, 

 however, not the same in the two countries. On the hypothesis that Australia had 

 originally been peopled by Negritos, that race had disappeared from it, and the 

 straight-haired race, now known to us as the aborigines, had taken its place. The 

 fact that similar straight-haired aborigines had not been found in Tasmania, points to 

 its separation as preceding their extension into the present southern seaboard of the 

 great Australian continent. 



17. The structural differences between the Negritos and the Tasmanians may 

 have been due to the geographical insulation of the latter, the production of varia- 

 tions from time to time, and their intensification and perpetuation through many 

 generations. 



18. The hypothesis that the Negritos had migrated eastwards along the chain of 

 islands in the Western Pacific as far as New Caledonia, and had become the ancestors 

 of the Melanesians, does not harmonise with the existence, at the present day, side 

 by side in New Guinea of Negritos and Papuans. The food, climate and altitude 

 in the districts which they respectively occupy are essentially the same, and no 

 possible difference in environment would adequately account for the production 

 of the modifications in physical structure and in character, which distinguish the 

 energetic, sea-loving Melanesian from the shy, forest-retiring, pygmy Negrito, such 

 as would lead one to think that they were descended from a common ancestor. 



11). In regard to the ancestry of the Melanesians some anthropologists maintain 

 that they have ethnic relations with the Indonesians, who occupy the great islands 

 of the Archipelago south of the continent of Asia. It is, however, to be kept in 

 mind that in the Indonesians the skull is either dolicho- or mesaticephalic ; the breadth 

 and height of the cranium are almost equal ; the mean nasal index ismesorhine ; the 

 facial profile is orthognathous ; the stature is low though not that of a pygmy ; the 



* Referred to on p. 325 and in Bibliography. 



