rs comparatively little from the European;
but in the pelves of male Australians which I have examined, the
antero-posterior and transverse diameters approach equality more
nearly than is the case in Europeans.

No Australian tribe has ever been known to cultivate the ground,
to use metals, pottery, or any kind of textile fabric. They rarely
construct huts. Their means of navigation are limited to rafts or
canoes, made of sheets of bark. Clothing, except skin cloaks for
protection from cold, is a superfluity with which they dispense; and
though they have some singular weapons, almost peculiar to themselves,
they are wholly unacquainted with bows and arrows.

It is but a step, as it were, across Bass's Straits to Tasmania.
Neither climate nor the characteristic forms of vegetable or animal
life change largely on the south side of the Straits, but the early
voyagers found Man singularly different from him on the north side.
The skin of the Tasmanian was dark, though he lived between parallels
of latitude corresponding with those of middle Europe in our own
hemisphere; his jaws projected, his head was long and narrow; his
civilization was about on a footing with that of the Australian, if
not lower, for I cannot discover that the Tasmanian understood the
use of the throwing-stick. But he differed from the Australian in his
woolly, negro-like hair, whence the name of NEGRITO, which has been
applied to him and his congeners.

Such Negritos--differing more or less from the Tasmanian, but agreeing
with him in dark skin and woolly hair--occupy New Caledonia, the New
Hebrides, the Louisiade Archipelago; and stretching to the Papuan
Islands, and for a doubtful extent beyond them to the north and
west, form a sort of belt, or zone, of Negrito population, interposed
between the Australians on the west and the inhabitants of the great
majority of the Pacific islands on the east.

The cranial characters of the Negritos vary considerably more than
those of their skin and hair, the most notable circumstance being
the strong Australian aspect which distinguishes many Negrito skulls,
while others tend rather towards forms common in the Polynesian
islands.

In civilization, New Caledonia exhibits an advance upon Tasmania, and,
farther north, there is a still greater improvement. But the bows
and arrows, the perched houses, the outrigger canoes, the habits of
betel-chewing and of kawa-drinking, which abound more or less among
the no