l influences which make for progress. In other words, elements of
weakness have been allowed to linger on, which under the sterner
conditions of life entailed by fierce competition would long ago have
been eliminated and have made way for elements better adapted to the
environment. What is true of the human inhabitants of Australia in this
respect is true also of its fauna and flora. It has long been recognised
that the animals and plants of Australia represent on the whole more
archaic types of life than the animals and plants of the larger
continents; and the reason why these antiquated creatures have survived
there rather than elsewhere is mainly that, the area of competition
being so much restricted through the causes I have mentioned, these
comparatively weak forms of animal and vegetable life have not been
killed off by stronger competitors. That this is the real cause appears
to be proved by the rapidity with which many animals and plants
introduced into Australia from Europe tend to overrun the country and to
oust the old native fauna and flora.[108]

[Sidenote: In the centre of Australia the natural conditions of life are
most unfavourable; hence the central aborigines have remained in a more
primitive state than those of the coasts, where food and water are more
plentiful.]

I have said that among the causes which have kept the aborigines of
Australia at a very low level of savagery must be reckoned the desert
nature of a great part of the country. Now it is the interior of the
continent which is the most arid, waste, and barren. The coasts are
comparatively fertile, for they are watered by showers condensed from an
atmosphere which is charged with moisture by the neighbouring sea; and
this condensation is greatly facilitated in the south-eastern and
eastern parts of the continent by a high range of mountains which here
skirts the coast for a long distance, attracting the moisture from the
ocean and precipitating it in the form of snow and rain. Thus the
vegetation and hence the supply of food both animal and vegetable in
these well-watered portions of the continent are varied and plentiful.
In striking contrast with the fertility and abundance of these favoured
regions are the stony plains and bare rocky ranges of the interior,
where water is scarce, vegetation scanty, and animal life at certain
seasons of the year can only with difficulty be maintained. It would be
no wonder if the natives of these arid sun