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sentiment of brotherhood to all branches of the biological tree 
from the time when the idea of the common origin of everything 
did not appear as incongruous as it might do to the unphilosophic 
minds of the present age. At that period there would be no 
conception of a necessary specific difference between the animate 
and the inanimate. The native idea of the creation of man, 
according to the ‘‘ Native Tribes of Central Australia,” was that 
two beings who sat up in the western sky saw, scattered all over 
the country, various shapeless masses. This offended their sense 
of good taste ; therefore they descended to earth with their stone 
knives and set to work. A split on each side made the arms, a 
division at one end made the legs, a transverse gash at the other 
end sufficed for a mouth, two smaller ones for eyes, poking two 
fingers into the space between made the nostrils, and, curiously, 
the final step in this rough surgery was the circumcising of the 
new made-individual. He became now one of the Alcheringa 
ancestors, with power to continue the work, a supply of stone 
knives being left with him for the purpose. As Andrew Lang 
writes, they deemed themselves akin to all Nature, and called 
cousins with rain and smoke, with clouds and sky, as well as with 
beasts and birds. We have only to look at any of the old 
mythologies to see what a strong tendency there has always been 
to people any natural object with spiritual beings who had the 
power of communicating with or otherwise influencing the 
ordinary human inhabitants. It was only a step from this to the 
belief in metempsychosis, which appears to have existed in the 
earliest dawn of the human race, and to have been perpetuated 
to historical times. The idea in the mind of the native woman 
as to how conception occurs, and described in the “‘ Native Tribes 
of Central Australia,” is a pure metempsychosis, and is the 
origin of the system of totems. Scattered all over the country 
are the spots where the Alcheringa ancestors entered again into 
the earth. These spots are generally marked by some natural 
object in which the spirit resides. If a woman happens to be 
near one of these spots when she first becomes aware of being 
pregnant she has not the slightest doubt but that the spirit has 
jumped into her, and will in the process of time be reincarnated 
in the form of her child, who must then assume the totem 
characteristic of that particular spirit. 
Deep down in the basis of our mental constitution there must 
still lurk, and, perhaps not erroneously, a strong feeling of kinship 
to Nature, for if it were not for this, such books as Adsop’s 
Fables would never have attained their celebrity nor have main- 
tained their hold on so many successive generations of mankind ; 
nor would Kipling’s Jungle Book have proved so realistic tomodern 
readers. And we find that the Australian natives are no excep-. 
