THE FUTURE AUSTRALIAN RACE.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1208, 17 January 1878, Page 3

THE FUTURE AUSTRALIAN RACE.

[From the Melbourne “ header.”] This is the title of a pamphlet, written by Mr Marcus Clark, in which he builds up a speculative theory as to the physiological development of young Australia. Beginning with our ancestors, he asserts that Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Lawrence have depicted them as they lived, that “ Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gilroy have taught us how to recognise them, Lavater how to talk with them.” Although these men and women were our ancestors, Mr Clark holds that wc arc no more like them as a race

“ than they are like the men and women of fhe Puritan days, than the Puritans were like the Elizabethans, or than the heroes of the Armada and the Spanish main resembled the feudal barons of the knights of chivalry.” As regards “ourselves,” he contends that a considerable amount of “sturdy Anglo-Saxon stuff” exists in the Australians, and that by immigration Bathurst, Ballarat, and Bendigo became possessed of the “best bone and sinew of Cornwall, the b.st muscle of Yorkshire, the keenest brains of Cocknoydom.” He mentions that one has only to sail up Sydney harbor, ride over a Queensland plain, watch the gathering of a South Australian harvest, or mingle with the orderly crowd of a Melbourne Cup race, to see that in Australia there is the making of a great race. After dilating upon what food, climate, and habit, do for Australians, Mr Clarke sums up the probable characteristics of “Our Children,” as follows“ There is plenty of oxygen in Australian air, and our Australasians will have capacious chests, also, ccatcris paribus, large nostrils. The climate is unfavorable to the development of a strumous diathesis ; therefore, we cannot expect men of genius unless we beget them by frequent intermarriage. ....... For their faces. The sun beating on the face closes the eyes, puckers the cheeks, and contracts the muscles of the orbit. Our children will have deep set eyes, with over-hanging brows, the lower eyelid will not melt into the cheek, but will stand out en profile, clear and well defined. This, though it may add to character, takes away from beauty. There will be necessarily a strong development of the line leading from nostril to mouth. The curve between the centre of the upper lip and the angle of the mouth will be intensified; hence the upper lip will be shortened, and the whole mouth made fleshy and sensual. The custom of meat eating will square the jaw, and render the hair coarse but plentiful. The Australasian will be a square-headed, masterful man, with full temples, plenty of beard, a keen eye, a stern and yet sensual mouth. His teeth will be bad, and his lungs good. He will suffer from liver disease, and become prematurely bald ; average duration of life in the unmarried, fifty-nine; in the married, sixty-five and a decimal. The conclusion of this is, therefore, that for another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism ; his national policy Democracy, tempered by the rate of exchange. His wife will be a thin, narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her children, but without sullicieut brain power to sin with zest. In five hundred years —unless recruited from foreign nations —the breed will be wholly extinct; but in that five hundred years it will have changed the face of nature, and swallowed up all our contemporary civilisation.”