Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/79

 as to their numbers. Few still, however, are these numbers, even if we double the former reckoning, and sprinkle some four hundred thousand individuals over the great "Terra Australis." And this small number is still diminished each year with each advancing step of the colonist into the aboriginal homes. The natives generally cannot retreat before the colonial invasion, because their exclusive tribal system surrounds each separate native community with aliens or enemies of its own race; each tribe ever watchful of its own territorial boundaries, each often at variance with its neighbours, and many of the tribes, in consequence of these alienating circumstances, speaking a dialect mutually unintelligible. They remain in the colonized districts, and gradually die off. Many tribes have thus nearly or entirely disappeared within the present colonies.

They are decidedly low in the scale of human attainments. A controversy occurred lately as to whether the true Australian invented and used the canoe. He emerges from the degradation