of Nature we find something vaguely mentioned.
The earliest recorders of the native social life set down such features
as their previous experience of rude civilized life had made them judges
of. They notice the self-denying affection of the mothers, and the hard
treatment of the wives by the husbands, polygamy and the shifting
marriage unions. But when we meet with a casual remark as to the
tendency of the Tasmanians to take wives from other tribes than their
own, it seems likely that they had some custom of exogamy which the
foreigners did not understand. Meagre as is the information preserved of
the arts, thoughts, and customs of these survivors from the lower Stone
Age, it is of value as furnishing even a temporary and tentative means
of working out the development of culture on a basis not of conjecture
but of fact.

_Conclusion._--To-day anthropology is grappling with the heavy task of
systematizing the vast stores of knowledge to which the key was found by
Boucher de Perthes, by Lartet, Christy and their successors. There have
been recently no discoveries to rival in novelty those which followed
the exploration of the bone-caves and drift-gravels, and which effected
an instant revolution in all accepted theories of man's antiquity,
substituting for a chronology of centuries a vague computation of
hundreds of thousands of years. The existence of man in remote
geological time cannot now be questioned, but, despite much effort made
in likely localities, no bones, with the exception of those of the
much-discussed _Pithecanthropus_, have been found which can be regarded
as definitely bridging the gulf between man and the lower creation. It
seems as if anthropology had in this direction reached the limits of its
discoveries. Far different are the prospects in other directions where
the work of co-ordinating the material and facts collected promises to
throw much light on the history of civilization. Anthropological
researches undertaken all over the globe have shown the necessity of
abandoning the old theory that a similarity of customs and
superstitions, of arts and crafts, justifies the assumption of a remote
relationship, if not an identity of origin, between races. It is now
certain that there has ever been an inherent tendency in man, allowing
for difference of climate and material surroundings, to develop culture
by the same stages and in the same way. American man, for example, need
not necessarily owe the minu