ABORIGINAL REACTIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 14, 17 January 1931, Page 6 (Supplement)

ABORIGINAL REACTIONS.

LITTLE DIFFERENT FROM

WHITES

SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS.

Although the Australian native or "black fellow" is believed by anthropologists to represent the lowest and most primitive human race now surviving on earth, tests of the senses and mental abilities of these people reported recently to the Royal Society of Australia by Mr. H. K. Fry,, show little if any difference between them and the whites. The children of the Australian race, Mr. Fry reports, seem to have slightly keener vision than white children of the same

Among all the Australians, children or adults, the abilities of the eyes are the same as among white people. Optical illusions, for example, affect whites and Australians in precisely "similar ways. The Australians have little or no appreciation of what artists call perspective, Mr. Fry found, so that they do not readily see "depth" in a picture, but this apparent deficiency turned out to be merely lack of education in this Conventional idea.

When trained to see perspective, as white children are trained automatically by seeing pictures from their earliest days, the Australians showed quite as good appreciation of it as anybody Hse Recognition and appreciation of numbers was also the same as in whites, although the Australians lacked such results of education as the multiplication table arithmetic^

The sense of pain and that of touch were found to be the same among Australians as among whites, combating the familiar but probably baseless idea that savages appear stoical under suffering because they really do not feel the pain severely.