Palaeolithic series, and serviceable as picks, hatchets,
and chisels, shows remarkable limitation in the mind of these savages,
who made a broad, hand-grasped knife their tool of all work to cut, saw,
and chop with. Their weapons were the wooden club or waddy notched to
the grasp, and spears of sticks, often crooked but well balanced, with
points sharpened by tool or fire, and sometimes jagged. No spear thrower
or bow and arrow was known. The Tasmanian savages were crafty warriors
and kangaroo-hunters, and the women climbed the highest trees by
notching, in quest of opossums. Shell-fish and crabs were taken, and
seals knocked on the head with clubs, but neither fish-hook nor
fishing-net was known, and indeed swimming fish were taboo as food. Meat
and vegetable food, such as fern-root, was broiled over the fire, but
boiling in a vessel was unknown. The fire was produced by the ordinary
savage fire-drill. Ignorant of agriculture, with no dwellings but rough
huts or breakwinds of sticks and bark, without dogs or other domestic
animals, these savages, until the coming of civilized man, roamed after
food within their tribal bounds. Logs and clumsy floats of bark and
grass enabled them to cross water under favourable circumstances. They
had clothing of skins rudely stitched together with bark thread, and
they were decorated with simple necklaces of kangaroo teeth, shells and
berries. Among their simple arts, plaiting and basket-work was one in
which they approached the civilized level. The pictorial art of the
Tasmanians was poor and childish, quite below that of the Palaeolithic
men of Europe. The Tasmanians spoke a fairly copious agglutinating
language, well marked as to parts of speech, syntax and inflexion.
Numeration was at a low level, based on counting fingers on one hand
only, so that the word for man (_puggana_) stood also for the number 5.
The religion of the Tasmanians, when cleared from ideas apparently
learnt from the whites, was a simple form of animism based on the shadow
(_warrawa_) being the soul or spirit. The strongest belief of the
natives was in the power of the ghosts of the dead, so that they carried
the bones of relatives to secure themselves from harm, and they fancied
the forest swarming with malignant demons. They placed weapons near the
grave for the dead friend's soul to use, and drove out disease from the
sick by exorcising the ghost which was supposed to have caused it. Of
greater special spirits