50 
THE VOYAGE OE H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
people in this locality can be arrived at. So far as I know, only one skull from this 
district is in any collection, and although, as I have pointed out in this Report, it 
presents certain remarkable characters, yet as there is only one specimen I am not 
prepared to say that they are anything more than individual peculiarities. 
The evidence afforded by the study of the skulls of the Australians does not therefore 
appear to me to sustain the view that two or more distinct races of aborigines, since the 
discovery of Australia by Europeans, have been or are now living side by side. In no 
series of crania from one locality do we find such a combination of characters so marked as 
to differentiate them from the natives of another locality. The fact, however, that in 
South Australia proper, and in other places, more especially along the southern seaboard, 
there is a special tendency for the crania to possess a height index distinctly below that 
of breadth, would perhaps justify the inference that amongst those tribes an intermixture 
may at some previous time have taken place with a people in whose crania the height 
index was normally below that of the breadth, and that in proportion to the extent of this 
intermixture did this modification in the cranial indices show itself. 
In connection with this I may refer to the relations of length, breadth, and height in 
the skulls of the now extinct Tasmanians, a people who, from their geographical position, 
and from the fact that they had constructed and attained considerable proficiency in the 
use of both canoes and rafts, 1 may at an early period of their unwritten history have 
migrated across Bass Strait. MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy in their twenty-first Table 
give the measurements of five Tasmanian men and three women. In the men the mean 
vertical index was 71'6, in the women 68*9, whilst the cephalic index in the men was 77*7 
and in the women 75*2. Prof. Flower gives the measurements of the Tasmanian crania 
in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and places the cephalic index of fourteen 
skulls at 76*3, and the vertical index of the same number at 72*6. In both these 
series therefore, the vertical index is much below the cephalic. But there is this 
important difference between the Tasmanians and the Australians, viz., the much higher 
cephalic index of the former, so that in their relation of length and breadth they are 
mesaticephalic. It is possible that the Tasmanians may have at a remote period 
occupied the southern part of Australia, and have been displaced by the present Australian 
race, but that an intermingling of the two races may have occurred along the southern 
sea-board. 
On the other hand New Guinea and other islands to the northward are inhabited by 
a dolichocephalic racer, whose crania, as will be described in subsequent pages, have a 
vertical index distinctly above the cephalic, and as they are a seafaring people, it is not 
unlikely that an infiltration of Papuan blood amongst the Australians may have taken place. 
1 See Mr. Brough Smyth’s account of the Aborigines of Tasmania in vol. ii. of the Aborigines of Victoria, 
ulready cited. 
