of sandals or moccasins by the pedestrians of that day. None of this character have been reported from Managua. Undoubtedly a society which wears shoes cannot be assigned to the earliest stages of human culture. Many of the natives of Central America to this day never protect the feet in any manner.

In conclusion, I should say, there can be no doubt of these being genuine human footprints. They are not of that mythical origin which the fancy of savage nations delights to imagine (see Dr. Richard Andree, on "Fussspuren," in his Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche, s. 94. Stuttgart, 1878), nor can there be the least doubt of their authenticity. Their antiquity remains uncertain. In regions at once tropical, fertile and volcanic, we may expect sudden upheavals and subsidences, and the ravages of the most violent outbursts are repaired by a luxuriant vegetation with surprising rapidity. My own opinion is, that there is not sufficient evidence to remove them beyond the present Post-pliocene or Quaternary period.

ORDINARY MEETING, JANUARY 16, 1888.

D. HOWARD, Esq., F.C.S., IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the last Meeting were read and confirmed, and the following Elections were announced :—

LIFE MEMBER.-Principal T. G. Rooke, B.A., Rawdon College.

MEMBER.-Rev. J. Macarthur, M.A., London.

ASSOCIATES.-W. L. Courtney, Esq., M.A., LL.D., Fellow and Tutor New Coll., Oxford; W. Keiller, Esq., Wimbledon Park; W. I. Palmer, Esq., J.P., Reading; Joseph John Murphy, Esq., Belfast.

The following paper was then read by Mr. H. Cadman Jones in the absence of the author, who is now resident in Australia.

THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA: THEIR ETHNIC POSITION AND RELATIONS. By JOHN FRASER, B.A., LL.D., F.R.S. of New South Wales:

THE

HE aborigines of Australia present a wide and interesting field for ethnographical study. The field is as yet to a large extent unexamined and unexplored; for, although there are some books specially written about our aborigines, their customs and language, and although many of our older colonists can tell much about their habits, yet the subject has scarcely attained to the dignity of a scientific study. I purpose to-night to confine myself to a single department of this subject, the position and relation which our aborigines hold to the rest of mankind; and to take my arguments only from what I may be permitted to call the common religiousness of nations. And as I am I am a colonist on a visit to this country, and have not here opportunities and facilities for a complete treatment of my theme, I shall ask your permission to refer to and quote a portion of my past labours in this field, as published in vol. xvi. of the Journal of the Transactions of the Royal Society of New South Wales.

now

I have said that I mean to build my argument on the religious ideas and ceremonies which exist among our Australian aborigines, and the resemblance of these to similar institutions found among nations and tribes elsewhere. Now, of all the definitions which have been thought of as distinguishing man from the rest of creation, the one that describes him as the "religious animal" is perhaps the best. Some will say that man is the mechanical, the social, the omnivorous, and so on. The philologist will tell us that etymology declares him to be the "thinker." I grant that the power of consecutive thought is a noble gift to man, but I am ready to deny that it is his noblest possession. The religious instinct, however debasing the forms which it assumes, seems to me a diviner gift; for, while it stimulates, it also chastens and regulates the force and direction of thought, and lays hold of and moulds man's inner nature in a way which mere intellect can never approach. I am further prepared to deny that religiousness is a thing of man's own invention, that mere thinking will ever lead a man to acts of worship, or that the progress and development of thought alone will bring him to more enlightened forms of worship. The tendency, as registered by history and observation, is all in the other direction, towards degradation, not towards elevation; and if man were solely mental and emotional, his attitude in viewing the vastness, the energy and the multitude of the objects of nature around and above him would be one of awe and fear, not of worship. I therefore believe the manifestations of the religious sentiment among uncivilised nations such as the Australian aborigines, to be like ruins of an edifice, which neither they nor their ancestors ever built, but yet its very stones may tell something of its origin. Now, since man does not invent religious beliefs and practices for himself, we may justly argue that the presence of the same or similar ceremonies in nations at present widely separated in place indicates a common origin. The traditions of a great deluge, so similar everywhere, the folk-lore stories among so many nations, all tell the same tale,—a common origin. And, further, it is not an unreasonable thing to say that, as the human race was long ago split up into four great divisions, which we now call the Aryan, the Shemite, the Turanian, and the Hamite or Ethiopian, and which became antagonistic and locally distinct, so the primitive religion, with its beliefs and practices, would tend in four diverging directions, each portion, however, being homogeneous in itself, although retaining some features of resemblance to its brethren. Now, in speaking to you about our aborigines, I

have to do with the Ethiopian or black race, and if I can show you that the Australian beliefs are closely like those of the black race in other parts of the world, and yet in some respects similar to those of all mankind, I think I can then, without presumption, ask you to agree with me in saying that Lenormant and others must be wrong when they cut off the Australians from the record in the tenth chapter of Genesis, and thus from all connection with the sons of Noah.

My present task, therefore, is to show that the black tribes of Australia are connected with the rest of mankind, and especially with the black race in Africa. But, before I attempt to do so, you may consider it my duty to establish an antecedent probability, or, at least, possibility, that the blacks of Africa and the blacks of Australia are akin; this will carry me back to some of the earliest periods of human history.

The Chaldæan tablets recently deciphered speak of a dark race as existing in the plains of Babylonia from the earliest times, and along with it a light-coloured race.* This dark race I take to be the Kushites; they seem to have been the first occupiers of these regions, and had become so powerful that their empire reached from the Mediterranean to the Ganges, and from the Indian Ocean northwards to the plateau of Ararat. Other races, however, came down upon them from Central Asia, and, like a wedge, split them in two. Hence the position of this race is, in Genesis x., indicated ethnically by the names of Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan, which, geographically, are the countries we call Ethiopia, and Egypt, and Nubia, and Palestine. Their dominion had thus been thrown much to the west of their original seats, and had lodged itself in Africa, now their stronghold; but the other half of their old empire existed still, although much broken, for the later Greek tradition, in the Odyssey i., 23, 24, speaks of an eastern as well as a western nation of Ethiopians. Leaving the western Kushites to increase and multiply, and spread themselves into Central Africa, let us follow the fortunes of their eastern brethren. They are the pure Hamites of the dispersion, and long occupied the northern shores of the Persian Gulf and the plains of India. Meanwhile, a composite empire, called on the inscriptions the Kiprat Arbat, "the four quarters," had formed itself in Lower Babylonia. This Chaldæan monarchy-the first of the five great monarchies of ancient history-was overthrown by

* Even Cyrus, the conqueror of Babylon, found them there, for, on a cylinder, he speaks of "the black-headed race" as conquered and governed by him.

an irruption of Arab (Shemite) tribes about 1500 B.c. And now, as I think, a second wave of population began to move towards the shores of Australia, for these Arabs were pure monotheists, and in their religious zeal must have dashed to pieces the polytheistic and sensual fabric which the Babylonian conquests had upreared. Those portions of the ChaldæoBabylonian people that were unable to escape from the dominion of the Arabs, were absorbed in the new empire. But the rupture of the Babylonian state and the proscription of its worship must have been so complete as to drive forth from their native seats many thousands of the people of the "four quarters or zones" and force them westwards into Africa or eastwards through the mountain passes into the table land of the Punjab and thence into the Gangetic plains. Here, I imagine, were already located the earlier and purer Hamites, but finding them to be guilty of a skin not exactly coloured like their own, and not understanding their language, these later Kushites of mixed extraction regarded them as enemies and drove them forth into the mountains of the Deccan, where to this hour the Dravidians, and Kolarians, whom I consider their representatives, are black-skinned and savage races. Ere long these Babylonian Kushites were themselves displaced and ejected from the Ganges valley by a fair-skinned race, the Aryans, another and the last ethnic stream of invaders from the north-west. These Aryans, in religion and habits irreconcileably opposed to the earlier races of India, waged on them a relentless war. Hemmed up in the triangle of Southern India, the Hamites could escape only by sea; the later Kushites, on the other hand, could not seek safety in the mountains of the Deccan, as these were already occupied; they must, therefore, have been pushed down the Ganges into Further India and the Malayan peninsula; thence to pass at a later time into Borneo. and the Sunda Islands and Papua, and afterwards across the sea of Timor into Australia, or eastwards into Melanesia, driven onwards now by the Turanian tribes which had come down from Central Asia into China and the peninsula and the islands of the East Indies.

Many known facts favour the view which I have thus taken of the successive waves of population which flowed over Indian soil towards Australia. I will mention two or three of these: (1) Ethnologists recognise two pre-Aryan races in India. The earlier had not attained to the use of metals, and had only polished flint axes and implements of stone; the later had no written records, and made grave-mounds over their dead. The Vedas call them "noseless," " gross feeders on