PHYSIOLOGICAL IGNORANCE 277 



profound is the ignorance of the physiological laws of 

 reproduction that even the possibility of taking artificial 

 measures to prevent fertilisation is apparently beyond 

 the native's comprehension. White managers of 

 pastoral stations declare that only with great difficulty, 

 if at all, could the blacks in their employ be made to 

 understand the object of spaying cattle. 1 



Nor are these the only Australian tribes which 

 ascribe their little ones to the direct mechanical inter- 

 vention of supernatural beings. At the other ex- 

 tremity of Queensland, just across the southern border 

 in New South Wales, the Euahlayi hold that babies, 

 perhaps baby-spirits (for this is what they are called \ 

 by the lady from whom our information is derived), 

 are manufactured at special centres. Somewhere on 

 the Culgoa River baby-girls are made. Bahloo the 

 moon is their author, assisted by Wahn the crow. 

 Sometimes however Wahn presumes to make them 

 on his own account, with the dire result that the 

 babies he makes always prove noisy and quarrelsome 

 women. There is in one of the creeks a hole which 

 is only to be seen when the river-bed is dry. As the 



different with human beings is a mark of their superiority (Roth, 

 Bull. v. s. Si). A similar opinion seems to be held by some of the 

 Arunta (Strehlow, ii. 52). 



1 Roth, Ethnol. Studies, 179, s. 320. They understood abortion, 

 which is quite a different thing. Attention may perhaps be drawn 

 in this connection to the general ignorance inithe lower culture on 

 a kindred subject. It might be supposed that the cause of venereal 

 disease would be fairly obvious. Yet it is very commonly ascribed, like 

 many other diseases, to witchcraft. Of many peoples is probably 

 true what a well-informed observer in the latter part of the eigh- 

 teenth century asserts emphatically of the natives of Sierra Leone, 

 among whom venereal disease was frequent, that they cannot be 

 " convinced that it proceeds from impure coition " (Matthews, 136). 



