The Aborigines of Tasmania

Abstract

MR. H. L. ROTH has written an honest, unpretentious, and therefore most useful book on “The Aborigines of Tasmania.” He gives us on pp. 2–8 a very complete bibliography of all works treating of his subject, and he then proceeds to place before us the quintessence distilled from that little library. Why he should have printed two hundred copies only of his work, is difficult to understand, and does not speak well for the study of anthropology. No serious student of human palæontology can be without this book, and we should have supposed that the public at large also would have much preferred a trustworthy description of the life and manners of this now extinct race to the ever-varying theories of what a savage is supposed to have been or not to have been, to have done or not to have done, which abound in some of the most popular works on anthropology and sociology. In the fourteen chapters of his book Mr. Roth treats of the country, the form and size of its inhabitants, the psychology of the natives, their wars, their knowledge of fire, hunting, and fishing, their nomadic life, their personal habits, their scientific and artistic acquirements, their manufactures, their trade, their customs, good and bad, their language, their osteology, and lastly their origin.

The Aborigines of Tasmania.

By H. Ling Roth. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1890.)