geological and historical periods, but also from human organizations, tribes and nations, as outcomes of ideas and traditions governing them.

From a biological standpoint the bearing of isolation on the development and present state of the Australian flora and fauna and on the anlhropological and ethnological peculiarities of the Australian aborigines was fully discussed in all respects in the special scientific literatuře, but only the chief results of these investigations have to do directly with isolation in the anthropogeographical sense of the word.

In scientific geographical books on Australia and in the special literatuře on its politico-economical and social development the problems of the bearing of isolation on its population were not fully discussed up tili now, though quite a number of special subjects due to isolation were repeatedly pointed out.*)

Düring my first stay in Australia in 1909 and 1910 I was already much attracted by this problem and during my term of office as consul-general in Sydney from 1920 to 1922 I collected new materials which only a more intimate knowledge of a country and its life in all its aspects can yield.

I wish to consider this study as a first attempt how to follow the different elements of the problem of isolation from an anthropogeographical standpoint in the Sargest and most typical living example of an isolated unit which we have on the globe.

There is perhaps no other natural, historical or political unit so well adapted for such an analytical study as just Australia. The physio-graphical conditions of the island continent are characterized in the highest degree by features which we are entitled to consider as resulting from isolation. The Australian aborigines represent a human type which has not outgrown a most primitive stage of development and their preservation from extinction is entirely due to the almost complete isolation from influences of other human tribes. Modern Australia, the federation of British colonies having united of their own free will in a commonwealth and of their own choice continuing to be a member of the British Empire, is in its historical development, in its present state and in the social and political ideology of its population the outcome of those primáry and secondary facts, feit by man and strengthened by him, which isolate Australia as a whole from the rest of the world and its influences.

The Australian continent of which the island Tasmania is but a dependency, is only in the north comparatively close to other parts