Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/107

 it was powerless. The natives watched and admired the feat frequently.

The gigantic king-fisher, the laughing jackass of Australia (Dacelo gigas), destroyed innumerable snakes, centipedes, scorpions, and all kinds of insect vermin, and, as various venomous snakes existed both on the mainland and on the island, those who knew the habits of the bird were loth to see it destroyed.

Over the lands thus glanced at tribes of men had roamed as lords long before Spaniard, Dutchman, or Englishman laid claim to the soil or to the title of discoverer. They subdued to their use the natural productions of the earth, but were innocent of any kind of agriculture. Ethnologists have been unable to determine whence they sprung, or how their occupation of Australia took place; but the weight of evidence implies that as powerful races rose to mastery in Hindostan and in the Malay Archipelago, the extruded weaker families drifted southwards and found new homes.

One learned writer, Dr. Latham, unable to account otherwise for the fact that the Tasmanians had hair differing from that of the natives of the mainland, was constrained to suppose that the former must "have come round Australia rather than across it." Yet he classed both families as varieties of a "Kelæenonesian race." In some islands of the Pacific he found it intermixed with the Papuan race, and it need hardly be said that the facilities for admixture were great on the northern coast of Australia, to which unnumbered shallops might in the course of centuries be