"This was, perhaps, unavoidable under so sudden a change, from a life of hazard to one of comparative indolence, without precautions which experience alone could indicate. Many of them were aged. Several still suffered from the effects of their wounds, and few were prepared to adopt the means of graduating their exchanged position. The temporary necessity of resorting to a diet of salt provisions might also possibly operate prejudicially." He speaks of a pseudo-civilization "increasing an inherent tendency to pulmonary and inflammatory affections; and several were victims of intermutual violence and revenge." He told me that some had confessed to him that men had received blows in the loins, which would, in their decaying condition, produce the manifestations of consumption.
One prominent exponent of the Tasmanian decline, as with that of others, was the absence of children. Mr. A. C. Gregory, the celebrated explorer of Northern Australia, told me that in Queensland the want of reproduction was being already felt with the Blacks, even in the most recently settled parts, and that decay would set in. Though, without doubt, many Tasmanian aboriginal children disappeared during the hardships and harassment of the "Black War," yet the absence of births even more than the frequency of deaths completed the destruction of the people. From inquiry of the nine women at Oyster Cove, I learned that only two of them had ever had a child. One of the two had one child, and the other two children; all had died many years ago. Upon my expressing my surprise, one said, with a burst of laughter, "What good hab him piccaninny?" Another, with better taste, remarked, "What por? blackfellow, him all die."
But some, struck with the non-fertility of Australian and Tasmanian women, have supposed that some mysterious effect was produced by their intercourse with white men. Count Strzelecki advanced this theory respecting the dark-skinned female:
"She loses the powers of conception, on a renewal of intercourse with a male of her own race, retaining only that of procreating with the white man." Again, "Hundreds of instances of this extraordinary fact are recorded in the writer's memoranda, all occurring invariably under the same circumstances among the Hurons, Seminoles, Red Indians, Yakies, Mendoza Indians, Auracos, South Sea Islanders, and Natives of New Zealand,
