o believe their own tradition
that they originally sprang from the sea; and yet this people are even
more elaborately tattooed than the natives of the Feejee Islands.

The Tasmanian aborigines "wore no clothing whatever when first
discovered, leaving even those parts of the person exposed which an
innate sense of decency causes most savages to conceal. They hunted the
kangaroo with spears, and brought down birds with a heavy whirling
stick," says an old chronicler; but whether he means by "a heavy
whirling stick" to indicate the boomerang, we cannot say. If these
savages possessed that ingenious instrument, it would show that they
must have been more or less intimate with the Australian aborigines, who
doubtless invented it. They are said to have been low in the scale of
barbarism; but they were not stupid, lighting fires by the friction of
two pieces of dry wood, and roasting their fowls, fish, and prisoners of
war before eating them. They were openly addicted to cannibalism to the
very last, until association with the whites gradually ended this
barbarism. They however secretly practised infanticide until formally
interfered with by the laws of the white invaders.

So late as sixty years ago there were three or four thousand of these
people still in existence in Tasmania, but to-day not one soul is living
to represent the race; civilization to them has indeed proved to be an
active agent of destruction. They were bold and independent, prompt to
resent an injury, but very poorly provided with the means of avenging
themselves. Their weapons were mere toys when compared with the
fire-arms of the whites. The war constantly waged between the two races
was most unequal, and ended only in the extermination of the natives.
These savages had to deal largely with escaped prisoners and
ex-convicts, who were hardly less savage, thinking no more of shooting a
black man than they would of shooting a kangaroo; and it is affirmed
that this class of whites banded together and hunted the aborigines as
they would wild beasts. No wonder that the natives retaliated in kind,
and that when they found an unprotected family of whites they savagely
destroyed women and children, and burned down their homes. Thus mutual
destruction went on, the whites being annually reinforced by numbers
from across the sea, and the barbaric natives dwindling rapidly away.

When the country cast off the disgrace of being a penal colony, the name
it bore was ve