THROUGH the use of fire the Tasmanian Aborigines altered the landscape of their island permanently and deliberately in their favour. They had three reasons for burning regularly large areas of their local territories : to keep open inter-regional communication routes, to create favourable living conditions for large herds of kangaroos (by helping the growth of young green shoots and by cutting out thickets when burning the underwood in open woodland), and to drive the game into a certain direction by way of circular fires. Whereas Cleland maintained in 1940 that the natives of Tasmania and Australia exercised but little influence over their environment (p. 97), and in 1957 still doubted if the Tasmanian Aborigines had altered their environment through the use of fire in the course of millenaries (p. 150), the conclusion in more recent years is that large tracts of coastal heath, moorland and sedgeland in Tasmania, but also open woodlands instead of rain forests, have been caused by the hand of man (Gilbert, 1959 : 143 ; Davies, 1964 : 252 ; Jackson, 1965 : 30 ; Jones, 1970 : 224 ; also see Hiatt, 1967 : 107 ; Robinson, 1966 : 101, note 17). Although the Tasmanian Aborigines were masters in the art of handling fire, it has remained dark up to our time how they lit it. To the diffusionists the method of kindling a fire was an index fossil in cultural comparison. Therefore one turned with special interest to the methods of the Tasmanian Aborigines, who were generally regarded as being so archaic . The sources on that question were contradictory, and so were the opinions of those who evaluated them (Schmidt, 19100 : 65 ; 19106 : 239; 1942: 376; Speiser, 1942: 239; 1946: 13; Poch, 1916 : 71; Plomley, 1962 : 11 ; Plomley in Robinson, 1966 : 225, note 5 ; see also H. L. Roth, 1890 : XII, 96 ; 1899 : 83* APPH)What the fire-plough is to Roth, Schmidt and Poch, the fire-drill is to Speiser. Plomley, however, rejects both theories because he does not attribute to the Tasmanian Aborigines any knowledge of lighting a fire at all There is implicit agreement only on the opinion that making fire by percussion was unknown to the Aborigines. When trying to solve those contradictions one should bear in mind that it must have been very difficult to light a fire by any of the primitive methods in question in the moist Tasmanian climate. That is why the Aborigines always carried torches and glowing pieces of rolled bark with them. No European has ever observed them lighting a fire. The fire-drill was certainly not Tasmanian, although specimens in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, in the Natural History Museum in Chicago, and in the Queen