732 
THE VOYAGE OF H.M.S. CHALLENGER. 
Australians are a well-marked dolichocephalic race, the men with strongly projecting 
glabella and supraciliary ridges, and with a deep depression at the root of the nose. The 
nostrils also are wide, and the index of the nose is platyrhine. From my own measure- 
ments, and from an analysis of the measurements of crania recorded by various observers, 
it has been shown in my Report that the skulls collected to the north of the latitude of the 
southern boundary of Queensland have almost invariably the vertical index greater than 
the cephalic, whilst in the skulls from the south of that latitude a large proportion have 
the height appreciably less than the breadth. The low vertical index has especially been 
observed in the tribes in the Adelaide district, South Australia, and the crania which possess 
this character have been called by MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy dolichoplatycephalic. Of 
twenty-two skulls from this district which have been measured, seventeen had the vertical 
index less than the cephalic. It is not unlikely that in those tribes an intermixture may 
at some previous time have taken place with a people in whose crania the height index 
was below that of the breadth, and that in proportion to the extent of this intermixture 
did the tendency to a diminution in the vertical index show itself. In the crania of the 
now extinct Tasmanians the vertical index is much below the cephalic, and it is possible 
that they may have occupied, at a remote period, the southern part of Australia and been 
displaced by the Australian race, and the two races may have intermingled along the 
southern sea board. 
“ Various theories have been advanced as to the origin of the Mahoris or Polynesians, 
though none of them is perhaps entirely satisfactory. America has been regarded by 
some as their original home, from which they diffused themselves over the eastern 
Pacific in the course of the trade winds. By others Asia and the Malay race have 
been considered as their progenitor, and the term Malayo-Polynesian is on this view a 
popular ethnological designation for them. Others again, like Mr. Wallace, have 
accounted for both Polynesians and Melanesians on the well known theory of Charles 
Darwin that the Pacific is an area of subsidence, that its coral reefs mark out the 
position of former continents and islands, and that both races are merely varying , 
forms of one great Oceanic race, the diversities of which are to be accounted for 
by the certain effects of the varying physical conditions which have resulted in the 
present state of the surface of the land in Oceania. But it is difficult to under- 
stand wherein such varying physical conditions could reside in islands subject to such 
uniform or closely allied climatic conditions as the tropical islands of the Admiralty, 
New Hebrides and Tonga groups, even on the supposition that they had at one time 
been the tops of continental mountains, so as to produce, in the two former, a black- 
skinned, frizzly haired, dolichocephalic stock, and in the last named a brown-skinned, 
straight haired, brachycephalic people. The hypothesis also which accounts for the 
origin of the Melanesians on the supposition that, in prehistoric times, a great south 
oceanic continent existed which extended from the east of Africa up to the Indian 
