PRESIDENTS ADDRESS—SECTION F. 135 
direction in which the culprit lives; then he huddles down 
between the legs of the front man, both of them having their 
heads on the ground, and in this uncomfortable position they 
remain probably for some hours in perfect silence, until they 
hear some one saying, “ Where is he?” Then they get up and 
go to camp, and sooner or later hear a noise like a crash of 
thunder, and know that the spear has gone straight to the man, 
and killed him. To punish the woman a rough diagram is 
drawn on the ground, which is supposed to represent her body, 
and by the side of this a piece of bark is placed, which again 
represents her spirit. All the time the men who are present 
keep singing exhortations to the evil magic, with which their 
singing is endowing the bark to go straight and eat up all the 
woman’s fat. Then all of them stick minature spears into the 
bark, which is finally thrown in the direction in which the 
woman has gone. Nothing further happens for, perhaps, some 
time, until one night they see a shooting star, and know that 
that is the woman’s spirit, and that she is dead. If she should 
turn up at a later period the explanation is a very simple one— 
there was some counter magic stronger than theirs, and what 
they saw was the spirit of some other woman. 
Though this by no means exhausts the various forms of magic, 
in the midst of which our native spends his life, and of which 
his thoughts are naturally full, still it will serve to give some 
idea of what a large part magic plays in the life of a savage. 
In different localities the nature of the magic naturally varies, 
but everywhere and at all times the savage is to a large extent 
occupied in endeavouring in some way to produce the results 
which he desires to bring about by means of the employment of 
superhuman agency. It never occurs to him to test his belief 
by means of experiment, or. to find out whether there is any 
such relationship as that of cause and effect between the means 
which he adopts and the results which follow. It is quite suffi- 
cient for him that his fathers have told him that if he performs 
a certain act a certain effect will follow, and if it does not then, 
he is quite content with the explanation that he failed because 
the magic of some one else was stronger than his own. 
Just as his entrance into the world was associated with magic, 
so is his exit. Some one must have injured him by evil magic, 
and the last act connected with the life of the Central Australian 
native is the attempt to find out by magic the name of the man 
whose magic is killing him. 
