The non-progression of some races has been accounted for on geological grounds. Mr. C. S. Wake contends that the Asiatics are inferior to the Europeans, as inhabiting an older formation; while the Africans are still more degraded, because dwelling in a region so long undisturbed by geological changes. On this supposition he places the Australians lowest in the scale, because he has been informed that New Holland is the oldest country, geologically considered, on the face of the earth. He assumes, too, that our southern races were, in the infancy of their career, placed most unfortunately as to climate and soil; that this retarded their progress when they might have grown, until they became so stunted in intellect as to transmit ever since a low and enfeebled condition. Once it was supposed that nothing but primary and tertiary rocks existed, the secondary being absolutely unknown in Australia. But recently a sufficiency of the last formation has been discovered to place that continent on a level with the civilized world of Europe. There is nothing so lithologically sui generis as to put the Australians and Tasmanians out of court. Do the Laurentian rocks of Scotland presuppose the existence there of the primitive people of the world?
But Sir Samuel Baker, the author of one of the most interesting books of travel ever published, has contended for the uncivilization of his very rude equatorial Blacks on a geological plea. He first claims for them a lofty antiquity, upon the idea of their country—mostly of secondary rocks—having been undisturbed while other regions were convulsed with change. He finds them so ignorant of a Supreme Being, so lost in brutishness, that he regards them as being "cut off from that world, lost in the mysterious distance that shrouded the origin of the Egyptian Nile." Assuming that "the historical origin of man, or Adam, commences with a knowledge of God," he proceeds: "Historic man believes in a Divinity; the tribes of Central Africa know no God. Are they of our Adamic race?"
The same argument can be applied to our Tasmanians with even greater force. Mr. Logan says: "The ultra-Indian and Indian races, whose migrations gave the earliest known population to the Eastern Isles, had not advanced beyond the Australian grade of culture when these migrations commenced." As they were, so they remained. Disconnected, we may say, as the
