Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/56

30 The tribes of the Barcoo Delta were, when I knew them, still in their completely savage condition forty years ago, and they used roughly-chipped flints either held in the hand or fastened in handles with sinews and gum. This was, however, not from want of acquaintance with the Australian form of ground and polished hatchets, since they obtained such by barter from the hill tribes to the south, but because their country did not supply the material of which such hatchets were made.

The level of culture of the Australians cannot be considered lower than that of the ancestral stock from which they separated, and their language discloses nothing that can point to a former knowledge of the arts higher than that of the present time, in their natural savage state.

It has been and still is frequently assumed that there is an ethnical relationship between the Australians and the Dravidian tribes of the Hindostan peninsula, and therefore this requires some special attention.

To connect the Australians with the Dravidians in the manner commonly done seems to entirely overlook some essential elements of the problem. These require that the original parent stock of the former existed far back in prehistoric or even in Pleistocene time, when the physical geography of the Asiatic and Austral continents and the racial character and distribution of the peoples inhabiting them must have differed very materially from those of the present time.

Therefore, any ethnical or linguistic connection between the Australians and the Dravidians must be considered to be merely the relationship of two tribes co-descendants from a common and distant ancestral stock.

I should be most unwilling to appear to underrate the great services which the science of philology is capable of rendering to anthropology; but it must be admitted that its professors are, unfortunately, not always possessed of that scientific caution which is so essential in all ethnological or anthropological inquiries. In Europe this has been shown by the results of the Aryan controversy; and it is sincerely to be hoped that no analogous results may be experienced