CHAPTER II
THE NATIVES OF AUSTRALASIA
Our Dramatis Personae include one semi-civilized race. There were the beardless, straight-haired, high-cheeked Malay — who is JJJLJ 008 * Mongolian, who lives outside-Australasia, and whose trade and ironwork have left indelible traces on Madagascar and Dutch New Guinea — and four representatives of the stone age, who know nothing of metals and very little of trade, the Australians, Papuans, Polynesians, and Mikronesians. Of these five the Australians are least mixed, and their civilization is lowest and most monotonous. The Tasmanians who form a sixth race are extinct.
The Australians — like the Dravidians of India and Veddahs The Amol Ceylon — have wavy hair, full beards, and chocolate-brown ^vT'lmu colour, and might be mistaken for some nude, scarred, dyed physical European, but for their thin skins, beetling brows, deep-set ^^ac^r- nose-roots, spreading nostrils, receding foreheads and (often) istics, their low but narrow skulls. The traditions of their totems take no note of time, and claim descent from some autochthonous man-beast or plant-man. Their languages — which are over 200— and between which there is a link of grammar but scarcely any link of vocabulary — change too quickly, and their modes of life are too simple to yield clues as to their kin. They neither sow nor plant, nor take thought for the morrow. The men hunt, and the ' gins ' (women) gather wild roots and plants for food, and their food is either eaten raw or broiled. Their canoes, which are of bark, would not carry them across ' Torres ' Straits. Their houses are bark-and- grass wind-shelters, and they have no domestic animals except the more than half-wild ' dingo ' (dog). Their weapons are of wrought wood and stone ; and their { male ' spear-throwers