"They have left unmistakable traces in Japan; we find them yet in the Philippines and in many of the islands of the Malay archipelago; they constitute the indigenous population of the Andaman Islands, in the Gulf of Bengal. Indeed, they have formerly occupied a great part of the two peninsulas of India, and I have elsewhere shown that we can follow their steps to the foot of the Himalayas, and beyond the Indus to Lake Zerah. I have only sketched here the history of this race, whose representatives in the past have been the type of the Asiatic pygmies of whom Pliny and Ctesias speak, and whose _creoles_ were those Ethiopians, black and with smooth hair, who figured in the army of Xerxes. "I have devoted two long examinations to another black race much less important in numbers and in the extent of their domain, but which possess for the anthropologist a very peculiar interest and a sad one. It exists no more; its last representative, a woman, died in 1877. I refer to the Tasmanians. "The documents gathered by various English writers, and above all by Bouwick, give numerous facts upon the intellectual and moral character of the Tasmanians. The complete destruction of the Tasmanians, accomplished in at most 72 years over a territory measuring 4,400 square leagues, raises a sorrowful and difficult question. Their extinction has been explained by the barbarity of the civilized Europeans, and which, often conspicuous, has never been more destructively present than in their dealings with the Tasmanians. But I am convinced that this is an error. I certainly do not wish to apologize for or extenuate the crimes of the convicts and colonists, against which the most vigorous protests have been raised both in England and in the colony itself, but neither war nor social disasters have been the principal cause of the disappearance of the Tasmanians. They have perished from that strange malady which Europeans have everywhere transplanted in the maritime world, and which strikes down the most flourishing populations. "Consumption is certainly one of the elements of this evil. But if it explains the increase of the death rate, it does not explain the diminution of births. Both these phenomena are apparent. Captain Juan has seen at the Marquesas, in the island of Taio-Hahe, the population fall in three years from 400 souls to 250. To offset this death-rate, we find only 3 or 4 births. It is evident that at this rate populations rapidly disappear, and it is the principal cause of the disappearance of the Tasmanians." The lecturer, after alluding to his studies in Polynesia, speaks of his interest in the western representatives of these races and his special studies in New Zealand, and referring to the latter continues: