the Royal Institution on the 31st of May, 1878, and published in the eighth volume of the 'Proceedings of the Royal Institution.'

Tasmania lies about one hundred and fifty miles from the southern extremity of Australia, and was discovered by Abel Jansen Tasman, in 1642, but although visited several times by Europeans, it was not till 1803 that the island was taken possession of by the English, and colonization from New South Wales commenced. All seems to have gone on peaceably till May, 1804, when, near the convict settlement of Hobart Town an unfortunate misunderstanding occurred, which led to the most disastrous results.

"A party of several hundred blacks, men, women, and children, engaged, as it subsequently appeared, in a kangaroo chase, were suddenly seen running down the side of a hill towards the infant colony. The alarmed settlers, thinking they were about to be attacked by a strong force, without any parley, fired volleys among the harmless and unhappy natives, killing, it is said, as many as fifty before the rest could make their escape. After this, of course, it was long before amicable relations could be re-established. fact, the black wars thus begun ended only with the departure of the last natives from the island in 1835."

In

The effect of this unfortunate affair was heightened by the character of the first settlers, who consisted of the most degraded class of criminals, who escaping from the settlements and taking to bush-ranging, were often the first Europeans that came in contact with the natives, and from them unfortunately they derived their first impressions of civilized man, impressions which no acts of the better class of colonists could remove. Thus the feud once established went on from bad to worse, till in April, 1828, an attempt was made by the government to divide the two races by a line of demarcation. This attempt, as there was no means of communicating it to the natives, of course proved unsuccessful, and in October, 1830, it was determined to drive the natives into Tasman's Peninsula, which being connected with the mainland of the island only by a narrow neck of land, scarcely a mile in width, it was thought could be easily guarded. When the cordon, however, closed on the neck of the peninsula, after many months labour and a

large expenditure, the result was only a single native, the rest having all escaped their would-be captors. Harassed by the settlers, driven from place to place, struck down by disease, and constant conflicts not only with the white settlers but between themselves, the native population rapidly decreased, till, when in 1835, a man named George Augustus Robinson, a native of Hobart Town, succeeded in gaining the confidence of the natives, and doing that by persuasion which the whole white population had failed to do by force, there remained only about two hundred natives for him to take charge of in the place of settlement, after several changes, assigned to them, namely, Flinders Island in Bass Straits. Here they continued to die off still more rapidly. Total change of habits, and the absence of all the excitement of war and the chase produced home sickness, and this added to the unfavourable climate of their new home told rapidly on their health, until in October, 1847, twelve men, twenty-two women, and ten children, forty-four in all, formed the sad remnant. These were allowed to return to their native country, but the mortality still continued, and in 1854, there remained three men, eleven women, and two boys. On the 3rd of March, 1869, died the last male, and in June, 1876, the last female,—the last of the race of Tasmanian natives.

In 1803, just seventy-seven years ago, the first European colonists settled in Tasmania. Now, so complete has been the extermination of the people whom they found existing there, that the only known remains of the once numerous race consist of four complete skeletons, less than thirty skulls, two busts, one of a man the other of a woman, and a few portraits. Such is the sad account Professor Flower gives of the dying out of the Tasmanian aborigines, and such will be the fate of the Australian, Maori, and many other native races. Driven from their hunting-grounds,

*

*M. de Quartrefages in 'The Human Species,' pp. 427-430, gives some melancholy statistics of the rapid decrease in numbers of the races of Polynesia, which he attributes in a great measure to the sterility of the women, and the introduction of phthisis, which appears to have taken fatal root amongst them.

they retreat before the advance of civilization; the game on which they and their fathers have from time immemorial preyed becoming scarcer and more scarce; their encroachment on the lands of their neighbours resented in front, and forbidden to trespass on the settled country in their rear; conflicts with both hostile native tribes on whose soil they intrude, and white settlers who are intruding upon theirs-soon make the struggle for existence hard indeed. Nor is the position much improved by government interference. The poor natives are placed upon "reservations" and assisted in various ways, but their freedom is gone: they are caged, but can never be tamed; and should they dare to assert their right to their own, terrible reprisals are made, and fresh restrictions imposed. All hope lost, all occupation gone, unable to conform to the new conditions of life imposed upon them, they rapidly decrease in numbers and finally cease to cumber the soil, which the colonist turns to so much better account. Of course the more confined the area, as in the case of Tasmania, the more rapid becomes the process of extinction. It needs all our philosophy to contemplate calmly this sad picture, but so it is through all creation: "the survival of the fittest" is always the result where the struggle for existence is sharpest. And can it be said that the world has suffered by the vast extension of the Englishspeaking race? I think not. We ourselves passed through the fire, and Roman, Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions, or military occupations, have so left their stamp both physical and mental upon our race, as to produce a people whose colonial possessions, small as their island home is, cover one-sixth of the surface of the globe, with a present population of more than two hundred and four and a half millions of beings (Enc. Britt. ed. 9, vol. vi. p. 159). There can, I think, be no doubt that the mixed race which will succeed many of the native populations at present existing will be vastly superior to that which will make way for it, but the process is a cruel one and fearful to contemplate, even when divested of the horrors with which the evil passions of the white races, and chiefly-I blush to own it-of monsters calling themselves Englishmen, have surrounded it. I need only refer you to such

instances as those related by W. T. L. Travers, F.R.S., in the 'Transactions of the New Zealand Institute,' vol. v. (1872), p. 78; and vol. i (1860), p. 176, of the same series; or to the sickening disclosures made by Captain A. H. Markham, who was sent out by the British Government in H.M.S. 'Rosario' to investigate and suppress the hateful trade in human beings carried on by white men, under the pretence of supplying native labour to our colonies. in the South Pacific.* The particulars are too fearful to quote, and those of you who are not acquainted with them will be saved many a nightmare by remaining in happy ignorance. Well may M. de Quatrefages (The Human Species,' pp. 461-2) assert that the white, even when civilized, from the moral point of view, is scarcely better than the negro, and too often by his conduct in the midst of inferior races, has justified the argument opposed by a Malgache to a missionary: "Your soldiers seduce all our women come to rob us of our land, pillage the country, and make war against us, and you wish to force your God upon us, saying that He forbids robbery, pillage, and war! Go, you are white upon one side and black upon the other; and if we were to cross the river, it would not be us that the caimans would take!" "Such," he says, "is the criticism of a savage." The following is that of an European, of M. Rose, giving his opinion of his own countrymen :

you

"The people are simple and confiding when we arrive, perfidious when we leave them. Once sober, brave, and honest, we make them drunken, lazy, and finally thieves. After having inoculated them with our vices, we employ these very vices as an argument for their destruction." Alas! the picture is in many cases but too truc.

But I must not dwell longer upon this portion of the subject, as I wish to point out to you some of the results upon the animals subject to man of this great exodus of modern times.

One of the most remarkable cases of the rapid extinction of an animal, brought about directly by man, with which I am acquainted, is that of the Rhytina, an animal nearly allied to the Manatee, formerly inhabiting a very restricted area in the Arctic Circle. This singular creature was discovered by Steller, the naturalist to • Cruise of the Rosario,' by Commander A. H. Markham, 1873.

Behring's second expedition, in the year 1741, on the shore of an island in Behring's Straits, named after that celebrated navigator. During an enforced stay of ten months on this island, owing to the loss of his ship, Steller had ample opportunities of studying the habits of this animal, and has left an excellent memoir, which was published in 1751, after the death of the author, and this is the only account of the species we have. In appearance and habits the Rhytina greatly resembled its near relatives the Manatees and Dugong, all the known species of which are inhabitants of the warm seas of tropical climates. Many of its structural peculiarities were very remarkable. In winter it seems to have had a bad time; many were killed by being dashed against the rocks by the waves or suffocated by the ice, and at this season all were miserably thin. When Steller first discovered this animal in 1741, it existed in such immense numbers that, he tells us, there were sufficient to feed all Kamtchatka; in 1768, only twenty-seven years after, the last of its kind is believed to have been killed. The whalers so soon as it became known what a store of excellent food, so easily obtainable, was to be found on Behring's Island, resorted thither to provision their ships. The result I have just told you. At the present time the only remains of the Rhytina known are, according to Dr. Gray, two ribs in the British Museum, received from St. Petersburg, one complete skeleton in the museum of the latter city, a second at Helsingfors, and a third at Moscow.

It is to be feared that the remaining members of the order Sirenia, three or perhaps four in number, will soon share the fate of the Rhytina. They are all inhabitants of the warmer regions of the earth, and were formerly very numerous, but from the ease with which they were captured soon became less frequent. Most of us have had an opportunity of seeing the Manatee alive in London, and could not fail in being struck with its old world appearance, and to have wondered that such a strange creature should have survived the later Tertiary period when the members of the order appear to have been most numerous.

Naturally associated with the home of the extinct Rhytina is another animal, which, although not actually lost to man, from