186 



Re-port on Philology, etc. 



the development of man physically and mentally, and 

 especially morally, as they do to admit any portion of 

 the evolutionary theory as illustrated in cosmogony and 

 biology. History presents us, it is true, with undoubted 

 examples of the retrogression of nations and races ; but she 

 also records from the earliest time known to us, progress 

 somewhere ; some nation always leading the van, and being 

 for the time, the centre of civilization and progress, not 

 perhaps marked from year to year, but certainly from age 

 to age. 



The nearest approach to primeval man, among the 

 extant tribes known to us, is found in Australia. One strik- 

 ing similarity between the Australian and primeval man, 

 is the use of the boomerang. Colonel Fox, at the August 

 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, maintained that this connects Australia with the 

 Egyptians and the Dravidians, the latter being the native 

 tribes of India, that is the tribes which inhabited India at 

 that remote time when the Aryan invaders had not yet 

 intruded there, and Huxley also shows that these races are 

 traceable in their bodily structure to the Australoid stock. 

 Colonel Fox also refers to the Journal of the Anthro- 

 pological Institute, vol. 1, No. 1, for July 1871, to prove 

 that several investigations have traced a connection be- 

 tween the Australian and Dravidian languages ; and fur- 

 ther, in practicing with a fac simile of the Egyptian 

 boomerang, from the British Museum, he succeeded in 

 obtaining a slight return of flight ; and he concludes his 

 argument with the statement that "to deny the affinity of 

 the Australian and the 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 gram- 

 matical construction was the same, because of their differ- 

 ing materially in their vocabularies. Now the Egyptian 

 and the Dravidian were early races of men ; and if we 

 accept the argument from the similarity of these races with 



