The great antipodal block of land we call Australia has, speaking roughly, the form of a vast quadrangle, 2,000 miles on the side, and extends from the hottest tropical, to the middle of the temperate, zone. Setting aside the foreign colonists introduced within the last century, it is inhabited by people no less remarkable for the uniformity, than for the singularity, of their physical characters and social state. For the most part of fair stature, erect and well built, except for an unusual slenderness of the lower limbs, the AUSTRALIANS have dark, usually chocolate-coloured skins; fine dark wavy hair; dark eyes, overhung by beetle brows; coarse, projecting jaws; broad and dilated, but not especially flattened, noses; and lips which, though prominent, are eminently flexible. The skulls of these people are always long and narrow, with a smaller development of the frontal sinuses than usually corresponds with such largely developed brow ridges. An Australian skull of a round form, or one the transverse diameter of which exceeds eight-tenths of its length, has never been seen. These people, in a word, are eminently "dolichocephalic," or long-headed; but, with this one limitation, their crania present considerable variations, some being comparatively high and arched, while others are more remarkably depressed than almost any other human skulls. The female pelvis differs comparatively little from the European; but in the pelves of male Australians which I have examined, the antero-posterior and transverse diameters approach equality more nearly than is the case in Europeans. No Australian tribe has ever been known to cultivate the ground, to use metals, pottery, or any kind of textile fabric. They rarely construct huts. Their means of navigation are limited to rafts or canoes, made of sheets of bark. Clothing, except skin cloaks for protection from cold, is a superfluity with which they dispense; and though they have some singular weapons, almost peculiar to themselves, they are wholly unacquainted with bows and arrows. It is but a step, as it were, across Bass's Straits to Tasmania. Neither climate nor the characteristic forms of vegetable or animal life change largely on the south side of the Straits, but the early voyagers found Man singularly different from him on the north side. The skin of the Tasmanian was dark, though he lived between parallels of latitude corresponding with those of middle Europe in our own hemisphere; his jaws projected, his head was long and narrow; his civilization was about on a footing with that of the Australian, if not lower, for I cannot discover that the Tasmanian understood the use of the throwing-stick. But he differed from the Australian in his woolly, negro-like hair, whence the name of NEGRITO, which has been applied to him and his congeners.