12 
large expenditure, the result was only a single native, the rest 
having all escaped their would-be captors. Harassed by the 
settlers, driven from place to place, struck down by disease, and 
constant conflicts not only with the white settlers but between 
lemselves, the native population rapidly decreased, till, when in 
«35, a man named George Augustus Eobinson, a native of Hobart 
own, succeeded m gaining the confidence of the natives, and 
doing that ;by persuasion which the whole white population had 
ailed to do by force, there remained only about two hundred 
natives for him to take charge of in the place of settlement, after 
seveml changes, assigned to them, namely. Flinders Island in Bass 
btraits. Here they continued to die off still more rapidly. Total 
c ange of habits, and the absence of all the excitement of war and 
the chase produced homesickness, and this added to the unfavour- 
able climate of their new home told rapidly on their health, until 
in October, 1847,^ twelve men, twenty-two women, and ten chil- 
dren, forty-four in all, formed the sad remnant. These were 
allowed to return to their native country, but the mortality stiU 
continued, and in 1854, there remained three men, eleven women 
and two boys. On the 3rd of March, 1869, died the last male, and 
m June, 1876, the last female, -the last of the race of Tasmanian 
natives. 
In 1803, just seventy-seven years ago, the first European 
coloniste settled in Tasmania.' How, so complete has been the 
extermination of the people whom they found existing there, that 
the only known remains of the once numerous race consist of four 
complete skeletons, less than thirty skulls, two busts, one of a man 
the other of a woman, and a few portraits. Such is the sad 
account Professor Flower gives of the dying out of the Tasmanian 
aborigines, and such will be the fate of the Australian, Maori, and 
many other native races.* Driven from their hunting-grounds. 
* M. de Quartrefages in ‘The Human Species,’ pp. 427-430, gives 
some melancholy statistics of the rapid decrease in numbers of the races of 
Polynesia, which he attributes in a great measure to the sterility of the 
women, and tlie introduction of phthisis, wliich appears to have taken fatal 
root amongst them. 
