of the land surface. Düring the younger geological periods only here the richly developed life of the tropical regions of Southern Asia was able to invade Austrália, and even so the results of this connection were but limited and one-sided, as by its climate Australia was little adapted to receive and to shelter the fauna and flora of regions lying within the moist equatorial belt. Only a narrow strip along the eastern coast of Australia, where the dry season is shorter and not too pronounced was open to the immigration of moisture loving plants which were able here to occupy the sites and soils well adapted for their development.

Otherwise, however, the Australian flora and fauna are the result of an exceedingly long isolation which, together with the climatic character of the continent, permitted their quite peculiar development. As land animals have fewer opportunities than plants to migrate across the sea, the effects of island isolation are here still more pronounced.

The flora of the greatest part of the Australian continent and its fauna are relicts of the geological past, decidedly poor in comparison with other regions with regard to the number of large groups repre-sented, but exceedingly rieh in kinds of those groups which for ages were able to develop and to adapt themselves to the conditions of climate and soil.

As from times immemorial the Australian aborigines lived isolated from all other human tribes, they developed into a distinct race of their own, characterized by its striking anthropological and ethno-graphical uniformity throughout Australia. As in very early days the connexion between Tasmania and the Australian continent was broken off, in Tasmania a still older and much more primitive human group was able to hold its own, and here we still find several kinds of mammalia extinguished on the continent itself by a later intruder, the dog dingo.*)

In all likelihood the first race which in historical times was restricted to Tasmania, and afterwards the Australians themselves immigrated into Australia by land or across but narrow straits at the times of maximum glaciation, when vast regions to-day covered by a shallow sea rose above sea-level.

Up to the end of the 18th Century this isolated black tribe repre-sented the only permanent population of the Australian continent. Why did then no other more advanced nation try to win Australia for itself?

Surely it would be unwarranted to conclude from the lack of historie documents, that up to its discovery by the Europeans Australia remained quite unknown to the seafaring nations of the Malayan and Melanesian archipelago. Just as the Papuans across the Torres Strait and its islands, so also from times immemorial the Malayan fishermen doubtlessly frequented some parts of the North Australian coast.**)