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127 similar grounds it has even been supposed that scattered islands are the mountain peaks of submerged continents, of whose people the natives of the islands are the survivors. Thus Giglioli, starting from the assumption that the frail canoes of the Tasmanians could never have brought them from Australia, has argued that the Tasmanians must have reached their island when it was connected with the mainland and, accepting Giglioli's statement that no case is known in which people have lost the art of navigation, Howitt has adopted the supposed passage of the ancestors of the Tasmanians by dry land. Again, the culture of Easter Island has led some to suppose that it is one of the mountain-peaks of a Pacific continent. The grounds for such hypotheses and conjectures are swept away if it be established that even an art so useful as that of navigation can disappear.

Another way in which use has been made of the supposed impossibility of the loss of the art of navigation is in the ascription of an indigenous character to the culture of certain regions. Thus, Mr. Joyce has lately argued against any influence of people from the Pacific Ocean upon South America on the grounds that along the whole of the coast of South America nothing but the most primitive raft was found. The facts I have brought forward deprive this argument of its cogency, though it may be noted that the absence of the canoe is only one of several features which Mr. Joyce believes to point to the indigenous nature of the Andean culture.

Lastly, I cannot forbear from pointing out an allied aspect of human culture which points in the same direction