4. Tanna—Ditto. Also a few words marked G. Bennet, in Marsden's Miscellaneous Works.
5. Erromango—a few words by Bennet, in Marsden.
6. Annatom—Ditto.
7. New Caledonia—A short Vocabulary in Cook. A longer one in Dentrecasteaux and La Billardiere.
All these languages, although mutually unintelligible, exhibit words common to one another, common to themselves and the New Guinea, and common to themselves and the Malay. See Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. i. no.[26] 4.
IV. The Blacks of Australia are generally separated by strong lines of demarcation from the Blacks of New Guinea, and from the Malays. Even on the philological side of the question, Marsden has written as follows—"We have rarely met with any negrito language in which many corrupt Polynesian words might not be detected. In those of New Holland or Australia, such a mixture is not found. Among them no foreign terms that connect them with the languages even of other papua or negrito countries can be discovered; with regard to the physical qualities of the natives it is nearly superfluous to state, that they are negritos of the more decided class."—p. 71.
In respect to this statement, I am not aware that any recent philologist has gone over the data as we now have them, with sufficient care to enable him either to verify or to refute it. Nevertheless, the isolation of the Australian languages is a current doctrine.
I believe this doctrine to be incorrect; and I am sure that, in many cases, it is founded on incorrect principles.
Grammatical differences are valued too high; glossarial affinities too low. The relative value of the grammatical and glossarial tests is not constant. It is different for different languages.