Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/28

2 driven to sea in a canoe from the vicinity of King George's Sound, would, by the prevailing winds and currents, be apt to reach the western part of Van Diemen's Land, He selected that point of departure apparently for the reason that the word for "water" among the western tribes of Tasmania is similar to that used by the natives of Cape Leeuwen.

In 1839 Captain Robert Fitzroy, in his narrative of the surveying voyages of the Adventure and the Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836, attributes the origin of the aborigines of Tasmania and Australia either to a party of negroes who might have been driven by storms from the coast of Africa, and thus reached New Zealand or Van Diemen's Land, or to negroes escaping or being brought to the northern shores of Tasmania as slaves by "red men."

The conclusions of Dr. Pritchard as to the derivation of the Tasmanians and Australians are noteworthy. They mark the great advance made in ethnology since the year 1847, but they also disclose the germs of those beliefs, as to the primitive races of mankind who inhabited the Australian and Melanesian regions and the Indo-Malayan Archipelago, which are now fairly established and accepted by ethnologists.

He goes back to primitive black tribes inhabiting "Oceania, Oceanic Negritia, or Oceanic Negroland," at a time when the "Malayo-Polynesian" race had not yet entered the Indian Archipelago.

He considered that this Negrito race was spread by way of New Guinea over the adjacent archipelago of islands, and that one branch took a more southerly course by the chain of islands ending at Timor, and lastly entered Australia.

In the same year Dr. Latham stated in the Appendix to the narrative of the surveying voyage of the Fly during the years 1842-1846, that the Tasmanian language had