platypus, emu--are ancient types, rough grotesques of Nature, sketching
as a child draws. The natives were a race without a history, far more
antique than Egypt, nearer the beginnings than any other people. Their
weapons are the most primitive: those of the extinct Tasmanians were
actually palaeolithic. The soil holds no pottery, the cave walls no
pictures drawn by men more advanced; the sea hides no ruined palaces;
no cities are buried in the plains; there is not a trace of
inscriptions or of agriculture. The burying places contain relics of
men perhaps even lower than the existing tribes; nothing attests the
presence in any age of men more cultivated. Perhaps myriads of years
have gone by since the Delta, or the lands beside Euphrates and Tigris
were as blank of human modification as was the whole Australian
continent.

The manners and rites of the natives were far the most archaic of all
with which we are acquainted. Temples they had none: no images of gods,
no altars of sacrifice; scarce any memorials of the dead. Their worship
at best was offered in hymns to some vague, half-forgotten deity or
First Maker of things, a god decrepit from age or all but careless of
his children. Spirits were known and feared, but scarcely defined or
described. Sympathetic magic, and perhaps a little hypnotism, were all
their science. Kings and nations they knew not; they were wanderers,
houseless and homeless. Custom was king; yet custom was tenacious,
irresistible, and as complex in minute details as the etiquette of
Spanish kings, or the ritual of the Flamens of Rome. The archaic
intricacies and taboos of the customs and regulations of marriage might
puzzle a mathematician, and may, when unravelled, explain the less
complicated prohibitions of a totemism less antique. The people
themselves in their struggle for existence had developed great
ingenuities. They had the boomerang and the weet-weet, but not the bow;