Lieutenant Gunn found at Maria Island, and preserved for several months, a catamaran, sufficiently tight and strong to drift for sixteen or twenty miles: each would convey from four to seven persons. The catamaran described by the French naturalist, found in Adventure Bay, was made of pieces of bark, and held together by cords made of grass, and assumed the appearance of meshes worked in the form of a _pentagon_. Mr. Taw, the pilot of Macquarie Harbour, saw the natives cross the river: on this occasion, a man swam on either side of the raft--formed of the bark of the "swamp tree." The distance between the islets is not sufficient to shut us up to the notion of a local creation.[28] A New Holland woman, taken to Flinders', remembered a tradition, that her ancestors had driven out the original inhabitants--the fathers, it is _conjectured_, of the Tasmanian race. History carries us back to the year 1642, and it is in vain to seek authentic information from a people destitute of records, and perpetually wandering. The time between the first visit and colonisation, was quite sufficient to obliterate the traces of earlier migrations. _Consanguinity._--A comparison of the Tasmanian with the European, would discredit a common root; but the wide spread family of man exhibits all the shades and varieties, by which the extremes are connected. Strzelecki observes, that to account for this connection, is not less vainly attempted than an explanation of the existence of marsupials: but the cases are not comparable. The difficulty, in reference to the human race, is resolved by its intermixture: nature mingles none but kindred blood. _Stature._--The man of Tasmania, is from four and a-half to five and a-half feet high. The skin is blueish black; less glossy than the native of the continent. The facial angle is from 73 deg. to 85 deg.. The features of the women are masculine: the mammae become pyriform, and elongate in nursing. The hair is black, and woolly; sometimes luxuriant, occasionally long and glossy. The eyes are full: the eyelid dropping: the iris dark brown: the pupil large, and jet black. The forehead is high, narrow, and running to a peak: the malar bones are prominent, the cheeks hollow, the breast arched and full: the limbs round, lean, and muscular: the hands small; the feet flat, and turned inwards. The frame does not differ from the common structure of man, and by science is not pronounced inferior, according to the rules of phrenologists.[29]