Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/772

752 not, then, authorized to believe that the Neanderthal skull was one of an idiot, or of any exceptional being not possessing the ethnic characters of the race which lived at the same epoch with him. If there still exists a race offering the same characteristics, there is no reason why that race may not have existed in a geological age anterior to our own. The Australian skull of the Neanderthaloid type, which is found, according



to Huxley, in Queensland, is also met as an erratic in New South Wales. But a tribe, seeming to belong entirely to the race under consideration, lived only in the environs of Adelaide; and the seven pieces from which the studies of the type were made are from that locality.

MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy conclude their study of the Australian race with an enumeration of the cranial characteristics which distinguish the Papuans from the Australians, and a comparison of those races with the Dravidian races of the interior of India. Common characteristics appear in both groups, and resemblances may be traced between the Australian and Dravidian languages. The evidence, however, is still too slight to permit us to assign a common origin to the races of New Holland and the black races of India.—La Nature.