hose of the North Coast of Australia,
meaning, I suppose, by the latter, those natives seen by him at Raffles
Bay and Port Essington. I may also mention that M. Hombron considers the
Northern Australians to be a distinct subdivision of the Australian race,
in which he also classes the inhabitants of the smaller islands of Torres
Strait (as Warrior Island for instance) attributing the physical
amelioration of the latter people to the fact of their possessing
abundant means of subsistence afforded by the reefs among which they
live, and the necessity of possessing well constructed canoes as their
only means of procuring fish and dugong, stated by him to constitute the
chief food of the Torres Strait islanders. Voyage au Pole Sud, etc.
Zoologie tome 1 par M. Hombron pages 313, 314 et 317.)

The two places from one of which the Australian population may be
supposed to have been more IMMEDIATELY derived, are Timor on the one hand
and New Guinea on the other: in the former case the first settlers would
probably have landed somewhere on the north-west coast, in the latter, at
Cape York.

Mr. Eyre believes that there are "grounds sufficient to hazard the
opinion that Australia was first peopled on its north-western coast,
between the parallels of 12 and 16 degrees South latitude. From whence we
might surmise that three grand divisions had branched off from the parent
tribe, and that from the offsets of these the whole continent has been
overspread."* Proceeding still further Mr. Eyre has very ingeniously
attempted to explain the gradual peopling of Australia, and even indicate
the probable routes taken by the first settlers during the long periods
of years which must have elapsed before the whole continent was overrun
by the tribes now collectively forming the Australian race. Dr. Prichard,
when alluding to the probable mode of dispersion of the black tribes of
the Indian Archipelago, conjectures that one of the branches during the
migratory march probably passed from Java to Timor, and from thence to
Australia.** Dr. Latham also inclines to the belief that Australia was
peopled from Timor and not from New Guinea, judging, in the absence of
positive proof, from the probability that "occupancy had begun in
Australia before migration across Torres Strait had commenced in New
Guinea," inferred "from the physical differences between the Australian
and the Papuan, taken with the fact that it is scarcely likely that the
Papuans of T