equatorial negroes, they never advanced, as they could not raise themselves. There is this difference, however, between them: the Tasmanian had no way of contact with higher cultivation, while the African, with the great Nile highway, must have had the shadow of old Ethiopian culture, although he failed to be impressed with its value. The latter never tamed the elephant; the former never improved native fruits by culture. Both simply belong to the unadvancing races.
On the aptitude of the Tasmanians and Australians, Dr. Davis has some observations, after an inspection of some of their skulls. He assumes that they were "rendered by nature utterly devoid of the power to receive that which is designated civilization by the Europeans—i.e. an extraneous and heterogeneous cultivation, for which they have no taste or fitness, but which has to be thrust upon them by the high hand of presumed philanthropy, and under the influences of which their own proper endowments are constantly injured, and they themselves are inevitably destroyed."
When lately examining the splendid collection of crania in the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, I took up a skull of a Tasmanian, and requested the opinion of an eminent French anthropologist upon it. He was pleased to describe it as equal to that of most civilized people of Europe, and superior to many crania of the educated. No phrenologist could object to its development, or doubt the civilization of the man on whose shoulders it once rested. Van der Hoeven had noticed that the skulls of Tasmania and New Caledonia equalled those of Europe in size, though they were different in shape. This induced a writer in the Anthropological Review to say: "Have we not in this fact a key to the psychological peculiarities which discriminate the two races? Is it not the different conformation of brain, running through all its organization, that lies at the basis of the great essential diversities of the two peoples?—one of which may be called the civilizable, or ceaselessly and almost endlessly progressive; the other, savage and stationary—if moved, moved only to destruction."
The American Indians were of old placed with the Tasmanians among the unimprovable races. Both roamed the forests, clad in skins of beasts, and subsisting upon the produce of the chase. The wigwam was preferable to the gunyah; but the seasons of
