race and to have
had woolly hair like them. Little is known of the language and character
of the unfortunate Tasmanian aborigines, and this is the more to be
regretted considering how useful a better knowledge of either might have
been in tracing the progressive extension of the Australasian people. The
prevailing opinion at present is that the natives of Van Diemen's Land
were also much more ferocious than the natives of Australia. But, brief
as the existence of these islanders has been on the page of history,
these characteristics are very much at variance with the descriptions we
have of the savages seen by the earliest European visitors, and
especially by Captain Cook who thus describes those he saw at Adventure
Bay in 1777: "Their colour is a dull black, and not quite so deep as that
of the African negroes. It should seem also that they sometimes heighten
their black colour by smoking their bodies, as a mark was left behind on
any clean substance, such as white paper, when they handled it." Captain
Cook then proceeds to describe the hair as being woolly, but all the
other particulars of that description are identical with the
peculiarities of Australian natives; and Captain King stated, according
to the editor of the Northern Voyage of Cook, that "Captain Cook was very
unwilling to allow that the hair of the natives seen in Adventure Bay WAS
woolly." The hair of the natives we saw in the interior and especially of
the females had a very frizzled appearance and never grew long; and I
should rather consider the hair of the natives of Tasmania as differing
in degree only from the frizzled hair of those of Australia.

HABITS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ABORIGINES.

Instead of the ferocious character latterly attributed to the natives of
Van Diemen's Land we find on the contrary that Captain Cook describes
them as having "little of that fierce or wild appearance common to people
in their situation;" and a historian* draws a comparison, also in their
favour, between them and the natives of Botany Bay, of whom THREE stood
forward to oppose Captain Cook at his first landing. The ferocity
subsequently displayed by natives of Van Diemen's Land cannot fairly be
attributed to them therefore as characteristic of their race, at least
until extirpation stared them in the face and excited them to acts of
desperate vengeance against all white intruders.

(*Footnote. The History of New Holland by the Right Honourable William
Eden, 1787 pag