Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/198

 REVIEWS.

By an unfortunate oversight the second edition of Ling Roth's Aborigines of Tasmania has remained unnoticed till now, but this by no means implies that the book has been unread by us. Nine years ago Mr. Ling Roth published a very valuable summary of all the accounts he could collect, after a diligent search, of the ethnography and physical characters of the extinct aborigines of Tasmania. The chief fault that could be found with it was that the edition was limited to 200 copies, which, deservedly, was very soon exhausted. Of the present edition only 225 copies have been printed. Apparently Mr. Roth distrusts the interest of the general public in his book, for no scientific man could wish a useful work to have an enhanced value on account of the paucity of numbers published.

It is of immense convenience to students to have all the available information about a given people collected and condensed in this manner, especially as full references are given for every statement.

The Tasmanians were perhaps the most primitive of recent men, hence the importance of gaining an accurate conception of their appearance, handicrafts, customs, and thoughts. Unfortunately these poor, persecuted people were never adequately studied, and there are but scanty and insufficient accounts of their customs and thoughts. Not only were these people still in their stone age, but they were in a "palæolithic" stage; indeed. Professor E. B. Tylor goes so far as to state that "judged by general character, their nearest old world relatives seem to be those oldest and rudest palæolithic implements, the plateau-flints of Kent. To enforce this comparison, I may add that it agrees with the opinions of the late Sir J. Prestwich and of General