Melanesia and Fiji, as in Malaysia, was an important article of diet. [21] Holothurians, a starfish-like creature, called in commerce _bêche de mer_. Yet in spite of an abundant food supply and a genial climate, these Oceanic peoples suffered a good deal from disease before the Europeans came. There was leprosy, which was a terrible plague in some islands; there were various forms of germ fevers introduced into the blood by mosquitoes; smallpox had come from the west, spread by the Malays. Mostly these primitive Oceanians led short lives; and if they were mainly merry and irresponsible, these spells of light-heartedness, of dancing, immoderate feasting and drinking, song-singing, lovemaking, gambling, and living the life of mermen and mermaids in the foaming breakers of a warm sea, alternated with heart-breaking struggles against the forces of nature, panics in regard to new diseases, terrors of unseen devils, torturing sacrifices to malevolent gods, murders, cannibal feasts, poisonings, and enslavement. In this description of the condition of man in Oceania I have made no allusion to Australia and Tasmania, for the reason that the natives of the southern continent (of which Tasmania recently formed an outlying peninsula) differed so remarkably from the peoples of the Malay islands, New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (including New Zealand) as to require separate treatment. The aboriginal Australoids are the most primitive, the least improved of existing human races: although peculiarly developed in some points, they are the lowliest form of real mankind known to us. They were considered at one time to be the descendants of a brutish but big-brained type, a veritable "ogre" which dwelt in Europe some hundred thousand years ago: the Man of Neanderthal. But this impression was wrong; the Australoids more nearly resemble the less specialised, ancestral human race of Europe. Australia was originally peopled by two distinct types of men: the Australoids and the negroid Tasmanians. These last had the curly black hair and depressed noses of Negroes, though they were also akin to the Australoids; which last people, except that they are dark-skinned and brutish-looking, are remarkably like savage white men! They have head-hair which is neither lank like that of the Mongolian nor frizzly or tightly curled like the "wool" of Negroes and Papuans. Unlike the Papuans, moreover, and still more unlike the smooth-skinned Mongolian and Amerindian, the Australoid has much hair growing on the face and body, as is often the case among European and Indian peoples. But they also exhibit a feature present both in primitive man and in the modern European--an exaggerated projection of the brows, of the bones of the forehead which shade the eyes. The stature is not much below the European mean, but the lower limbs are usually short and rather slender. The forehead is retreating, the large jaws prominent, and the teeth bigger in