Page:Aboriginesofvictoria01.djvu/79

Rh rather than across it.' Be this as it may, the remark, with our present scanty materials, is at best but a suggestion—a suggestion, however, which would account for the physical appearance of the Tasmanian being more New Caledonian than Australian."

That the island was first peopled by some members of the dark-skinned populations of the north is beyond doubt; but what was the line of migration can, perhaps, be gathered only from the character of the language, and we may be misled by the only vocabularies now extant. They were written down long subsequent to the colonization of the land by the whites, and it may be supposed after the blacks had had communication with natives of other parts of Australasia and the South Seas.

We cannot say how it was peopled nor when it was peopled.

If Dr. Latham's theory be accepted, it may have maintained a population long anterior to the peopling of the continent.

There was probably several times, but certainly once in the later Tertiary period, a land connection with Australia.

The formations on the chain of islands, and the fossil and living fauna and flora of the island and the continent, furnish evidences of the changes which have occurred.

The Thylacynus and Sarcophilus ursinus both live abundantly in Tasmania, but neither of them has been discovered on the continent; where, however, their remains have been identified by Professor McCoy with certainty in the cavern deposits and Pleistocene clays mingled with those of the extinct Diprotodon, Thylacoleo, &c.

In the Pleistocene period, animals abounding in Tasmania with very restricted powers of locomotion or swimming were as common in Victoria as in Tasmania; but at the present day neither the Sarcophilus nor Thylacynus is found on the continent in the living state. The wombat of Tasmania is totally different from the living wombat of Victoria, and the Pleistocene wombats are different from both. The commonest Pleistocene kangaroos are entirely extinct species. It would seem that the smaller carnivorous mammals referred to became extinct on the continent long before the modern period;—the Dasyurus maculatus (a third abundant large marsupial carnivore) occurring very rarely on the continent, but abounding in Tasmania in the living condition with the other two at the present time. At the same (Pleistocene) period the great plant-eating Diprotodon and Nototherium lived in numbers on the continent, but apparently never reached Tasmania.

Some parrots, honey-eaters, owls, and several other birds with considerable powers of flight are restricted to Tasmania, and a large number of the insects found in the island are different from those of Victoria, while perhaps three-fourths of the living fauna seem to be identical.

Dr. Hooker tells us that the primary feature of the Tasmanian flora is its identity in all its main characters with the Victorian; and that in one part of Victoria—Wilson's Promontory—the vegetation is peculiarly Tasmanian. He refers also to the fact, clearly established on geological data, of Tasmania having once formed a continuous southward extension of Victoria, and that