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Updated: August 22, 2024
Turn the Sandwich Islands into a trading community, and the native Hawaiian refuses forthwith to give hostages to fortune. Tahiti is dwindling. From the moment the Tasmanians were taken to Norfolk Island, not a single Tasmanian baby was born.
A Wallace might harass a large army with a small and determined band; but the contending parties were at least equal in arms and civilization. The Zulus who fought us in Africa, the Maories in New Zealand, the Arabs in the Soudan, were far better provided with weapons, more advanced in the science of war, and considerably more numerous, than the naked Tasmanians.
On the banks of the Rio Negro there are only a few half-breeds, Portuguese and natives, where a few years ago twenty-four different nations had their homes. Such is the law of progress. The Indians will disappear. Before the Anglo-Saxon race Australians and Tasmanians have vanished. Before the conquerors of the Far West the North American Indians have been wiped out.
Weld all men of ability, and very popular among the Tasmanians. After the initiation of responsible government in 1856, various reforms were introduced. By a very liberal Land Act of 1863, inducements were offered to industrious men to become farmers in the colony.
One could, for example, point out how the aboriginal Tasmanians and Australians have been almost completely extirpated; how, in the name of civilization, thousands of Dervishes have been mowed down in Egypt, and how South African soil itself has been stained from time to time by the blood of Zulus, Basutos, Matabeles and other coloured races, who became the victims of British, and not Boer, arms.
Owing to this innate cause, and by the instinct of imitation which results from it, children as well as savages always attempt some rude sketch of natural objects, or of the fanciful images to which they have given rise. Drawings of animals and some other objects are found among the lowest savages, such as the Tasmanians and Australians.
A curious fact indicates the same thing probably, if not certainly. Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held their ground before the ancient. There is no lament in any classical writer for the barbarians. The New Zealanders say that the land will depart from their children; the Australians are vanishing; the Tasmanians have vanished.
Take the Tasmanians, for example, one of the peoples which has recently become extinct, and regarded as one of the most debased in the social scale, and we have in a small compass a picture of the acts and beliefs to be found in their embryonic association.
On this basis skulls are classified in the text books as being microcephalic when below 1,350 cubic centimetres, such as those of the extinct Tasmanians, Bushmen, Andamanese, Melanesians, Veddahs, and the Hill-men of India; mesocephalic, those from 1,350 to 1,450 cubic centimetres, comprising Negroes, Malays, American Indians, and Polynesians; and megacephalic, above 1,450 cubic centimetres, including Eskimos, Europeans, Mongolians, Burmese and Japanese.
Of eighty married women, only thirty-nine had ever borne children; and "the official report gives an average of half a child to each married couple in the whole island." This is almost exactly the same average as with the Tasmanians at Oyster Cove.
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