PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.—SECTION fF. 
(Ethnology and Anthropology.) 
MAGIC AMONGST THE NATIVES OF CENTRAL 
AUSTRALIA. 
By F. J. GILLEN. 
+r 
Macic may be defined generally as the attempt to produce 
results by aid of some occult or superhuman agency. 
Unless one has come into contact with savages it is difficult 
to realise the extent to which the whole of their life is influenced 
by, and, indeed, bound up with, magic of various kinds. From 
the moment of his birth until the day upon which, perhaps, the 
spear of an enemy puts an end to his existence his thoughts are 
more or less occupied with magic in one form or another. If 
he suffers from the effects of an overabundance of food, it 
simply means that some evil magic has entered him; if he 
suffers from drought and hunger, this is due to the strong magic 
of enemies, who are preventing the rain from falling, and 
animals and plants from multiplying, and can only be overcome 
by counter magic. When he has eaten too much, the medicine 
man must exorcise the evil spirit which causes him pain, and if 
he cannot get enough to eat, then by magic he must cause rain 
to fall, and animals and plants to increase. If he desires either 
to help himself or to injure his enemy he has recourse to magic. 
In matters of magic a savage never dreams of putting his 
belief to anything like experimental test. That is a stage of 
culture to which he has not attained. What he is taught to 
believe, that he most firmly adopts as his creed; anything 
which appeared to be the right and proper thing for his father 
and ancestors to do and to believe is the right and proper thing 
for him to do and to believe, and, further stiil, it would be rank 
heresy for him, and would subject him to what he feels most 
keenly—the opprobrium and ridicule of his fellow men—to show 
the faintest trace of disbelief in what everyone else believes. 
Long after a people has passed through barbarism and 
savagery magic still holds sway ; within the past few years there 
have been found in certain out-of-the-way parts of Great Britain, 
hidden in nooks and cranniex where they are not likely to meet 
