226 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tions with regard to a supreme and beneficent deity, or of a great 

 and first creator, are indefinite and degraded ; they have no out- 

 ward worship, and they never alluded to their offering private 

 devotions." All this, however, implies a great deal more than 

 Sir John's bare statement, "According to Burchell, the Bachapins 

 (Kaffirs) had no form of religion and worship," etc. 



" Some of the Australian tribes," writes Sir John, "are said to 

 have no religion," and he gives as his authority for this state- 

 ment a reference to Collins.* Sir John does not quote literally 

 from Collins; he sums up his testimony, but his mode of doing 

 so is scarcely satisfactory. For Collins, while stating that the 

 Australians worshiped neither sun, moon, nor stars, or any object, 

 admits that those he came in contact with had " some idea of a 

 future life " ; that the greater number of them believed that after 

 death they "went to the clouds." Conversing with Ben-nil-long 

 as to where the black men came from, his answer was, " They came 

 from the clouds, and when they died they returned to the clouds 

 Boo-row-e," and he endeavored to make Collins understand that 

 when the black men died " they ascended as little children." Col- 

 lins further states that these Australians have ideas of the distinc- 

 tion between good and bad, and of right and wrong, but their 

 knowledge of the difference between right and wrong never ex- 

 tended beyond their existence in this world, and their ideas about 

 the future state had no influence on their lives and actions an 

 assertion that might, unfortunately, be truthfully made in con- 

 nection with the religious views of many professing Christians. 



In dealing with the lake tribes of Central Africa Sir John 

 gives Burton as his authority for stating that some of them " ad- 

 mit neither God, nor angel, nor devil." His words are : " Burton 

 also states that some of the tribes in the lake districts of Central 

 Africa ' admit neither God, nor angel, nor devil.' " f This quota- 

 tion is very meager, and its meagerness is scarcely just toward 

 Burton. Burton is describing fetichism, which he says " admits 

 neither God, nor angel, nor devil "a statement certainly open to 

 argument and then he proceeds as follows: "Fetichism," he 

 writes, " is the adoration, or rather the propitiation, of natural 

 objects, animate or inanimate to which certain mysterious in- 

 fluences are attributed. Though instinctively conscious of a 

 Being beyond them, of a first cause to every effect subject to 

 their senses, the Africans have as yet failed to grasp the idea, in 

 their feeble minds it is an embryo rather than an object, at the 

 best a vague god, without personality, attributes, or providence. 

 They call that being Mulungu the Ahlunga of the Kaffirs, and 



* English Colony in New South Wales, p. 354. 



\ Transactions of the Ethnological Society, New Series, vol. i, p. S23. 



