The question of the origin of the Australian and Tasmanian aborigines has engaged the attention of many writers, who have attempted its solution by inferences drawn from language, from custom, from the physical character of those savages, and, while direct evidence is not existent, from what some writers apparently assume to be fact.

Before entering upon the conclusions to which I have been led in this inquiry, it will be well to note in chronological order the views of various authorities, in doing which I have found it necessary to include those dealing with the Tasmanians.

Mr. R. H. Davis considered the Tasmanians to be scions of the Australians, and that their ancestors, being driven to sea in a canoe from the vicinity of King George's Sound, would, by the prevailing winds and currents, be apt to reach the western part of Van Diemen's Land. He selected that point of departure apparently for the reason that the word for “water” among the western tribes of Tasmania is similar to that used by the natives of Cape Leeuwen.

In 1839 Captain Robert Fitzroy, in his narrative of the surveying voyages of the Adventure and the Beagle, between the years 1826 and 1836, attributes the origin of the aborigines of Tasmania and Australia either to a party of negroes who might have been driven by storms from the coast of Africa, and thus reached New Zealand or Van Diemen's Land, or to negroes escaping or being brought to the northern shores of Tasmania as slaves by “red men.”