AUSTRALIAN IDEA OF GOD. 3OI 



dealing with stagnation or incomplete development. 

 Thus the idea that the Australians have no trace of 

 religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this 

 religion is certainly quite deteriorated, and has degene- 

 rated into a wild, disjointed, and often incredibly absurd 

 demonology, into a superstitious fear of apparitions." 

 , But when a few lines later in the work quoted, we are 

 informed that the natives to the west of the Liverpool 

 range, ascribe everything in nature which they cannot 

 explain to the Devil-Devil, and that this is manifestly 

 only a name, derived from the English Devil, for a Deity 

 of whom they have not preserved any distinct conception, 

 the shallowness of this evidence in favour of the hypo- 

 thesis of a previous standpoint, now sunk into oblivion, 

 enables us to infer the value of the other instances. We 

 have far more reason to believe this low state of mental 

 development in harmony with the bodily condition, 

 v/hen we hear that the natives of the Gulf of St. Vincent 

 and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are extremely hairy, 

 and that even the brown-coloured down of the children 

 is so abundant and so long, that the skin of boys of 

 five or six years of age assumes a furry appearance. 

 But, contrary to all experience and history, we are 

 required to believe ^* that the inhabitants of the northern 

 parts of Australia are the most aboriginal, for "they 

 are the most civilized, as well as the best developed, in 

 mind and body ; they only are fixed in one dwelling- 

 place ; and in any case the supposition is easier and 

 more natural that the other natives should have de- 

 generated, with their eternal wanderings, than that the 

 former, fixed by the more convenient territory, should 

 have raised themselves." 



