Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/43

Rh into further details we may state that everything referring to the propagation of the species is carefully regulated, with the object of compelling men to take wives from alien hordes. The most important Australian feast is the celebration of the attainment of puberty by the young men, who on this occasion are subjected to severe ordeals and cruel tortures, such as circumcision, ghastly tattooing, or the extraction of one or two front teeth.

It has been asserted that the Australians represent a degenerate race, and that their remote ancestors had attained a far higher degree of civilization. Some paintings, which adorn the walls of caves on Glenelg River, in northwestern Australia, have been adduced in support of this hypothesis. It is evident, however, from the cast of the features, the cranial formation, the long garments, hats, and shoes of the figures in these sketches that they were made by shipwrecked Europeans, or perhaps Phoenicians. Everything in the life, language, traditions, habits, and general character of the Australians indicates a primitive people who, instead of deteriorating, have made some slight advancement in culture. The fact that they show no marks of near kinship with their neighboring islanders, the Papuans, Malays, or Maoris, tends to complicate the question of their origin. They possess many anthropological characteristics in common with the Dravidian hill tribes of the Deccan and the pre-Dravidian Veddas of Ceylon, such as the shape of the skull, the outlines of the face, and the waviness (in distinction from woolliness) of the hair; and these physical resemblances acquire additional significance through striking similarities in the Dravidian and Australian languages. If it be true as has been maintained, and seems highly probable, that the Caucasian race is of Dravidian origin, the Australians might claim to be very remote kinsmen of the Europeans, and their likeness to degenerate types of the latter is certainly quite strong.

As already indicated, the Papuans of New Guinea belong to the later or neolithic period of the stone age, and their superior culture is especially manifest in their artistic skill and taste. Their implements are made of wood, stone, shells, bones, and similar materials, and they have never learned the use of any metal. The hatchets, of feldspar, hornblende, and other stones, are not rudely chipped, but beautifully polished, and they manufacture vessels of burned clay in which to cook their food. Everything they fabricate is remarkable for elegance of form and delicacy of ornamentation. One can not but wonder at the perfection of workmanship wrought by stone tools—knives and daggers exquisitely carved out of wood or the bones of the cassowary, bracelets, frontlets, and necklaces of