tribes. Even in Australia it was exceedingly rare to see a half-caste, at a time when children's laughter rang through the encampment. Then, as Mr. Schmidt, the Queensland missionary, found, "it was the rule to destroy the half-caste immediately after birth." Mr. G. A. Robinson and other Protectors said the same thing of Port Phillip. In more modern times, since a birth of any kind has become so uncommon a circumstance, the half-castes have been occasionally suffered to live, and have been even cherished with pride by the tribe. I have been several times pleased with the exultant satisfaction of the miserable remnant of a once mighty tribe at the yellow baby. Once, while admiring a very pretty specimen of the mixture in Victoria, a fine-bearded young fellow strode up smiling to me, saying, "That me picaninny—you gib it tixpence." He then burst into a roar of laughter at his assumption of paternity. But even these, as Mr. Protector Parker observed, disappear mysteriously at the age of puberty, if suffered to last so long.
To the honour of the Government of Van Diemen's Land, efforts were made to save the offspring of such connexions. We read of a sawyer, one Smith, and his black friend, Mrs. Fanny Cochrane Smith, receiving twenty-five pounds a year for their half-caste child. Grants of land have been made to reputed parents, subject to the life of the offspring in some cases, and in others contingent upon the orthodox marriage of the mother. But the tribe have repeatedly avenged their honour by murdering the little one, whom they decoyed to their secluded haunts.
That which has excited most astonishment and disgust has been the indifference of English fathers to the future being of their progeny. Dr. Carl Vogt, in his work on Man, thus calls attention to the charge:—"Even if it were true that the Australians (or Tasmanians) killed the bastards who with their mothers return to their tribe, it might at the same time be fairly assumed that all European fathers, who produce children with Australian women, were not such monsters as to expose them to certain death. We cannot suppose such an abnegation of every human feeling to have existed, even among the first criminal population of Australia." Yet such was the case. It can scarcely be pleaded in extenuation of their brutality, that gentlemen at home, admitted into the best circles, have been quite as heedless as to the future existence, or otherwise, of the fruits
