What is known of the Tasmanians scarcely permits us to consider them superior to the Australians. It must, however, be admitted that those unfortunate islanders of Van Diemen’s Land have not been so much attended to as the Australians. The English, so humane and patient as regards the latter, have committed upon the Tasmanian race, and that in the nineteenth century, execrable atrocities a hundred times less excusable than the hitherto unrivalled crimes of which the Spaniards were guilty in the fifteenth century in the Antilles. These atrocities have terminated in a regular extermination,[49] caused, say the optimists, by the absolute unsociability of the Tasmanians.[50] This is not, in our opinion, a mitigatory circumstance, but from all these facts there results evidently, that, of all human beings, the Tasmanians are, or rather were, with the Australians, nearest to the brutal condition. The investigation of the results obtained from the intermixture of Anglo-Saxons with these inferior races, may give us an idea what the crossing between the two most disparate branches of the human family may produce. M. Omalius d’Halloy, President of the Belgian Senate, a venerable scholar, as well known for his geological as for his anthropological works, thus concludes the seventh chapter of his _Treatise on the Races of Man_: “It is remarkable that, though a considerable number of Europeans now inhabit the same countries as the Andamenes, no mention is made of the existence of hybrids resulting front their union.”[51] Under the name of Andamenes, d’Halloy comprises the Australians, Tasmanians, and all the blacks with woolly hair of Melanesia and Malasia.