NATURE 



489 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1890. 



THE ABORIGINES OF TASMANIA. 

 The Aborigines of Tasmania. By H. Ling Roth. (Lon- 

 don : Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, and Co., 1890.) 

 MR. H. L. ROTH has written an honest, unpreten- 

 tious, and therefore most useful book on " The 

 Aborigines of Tasmania." He gives us on pp. 2-8 a very 

 complete bibliography of all works treating of his sub- 

 ject, and he then proceeds to place before us the quint- 

 essence distilled from that little library. Why he should 

 have printed two hundred copies only of his work, is 

 difficult to understand, and does not speak well for the 

 study of anthropology. No serious student of human 

 palaeontology can be without this book, and we should 

 have supposed that the public at large also would have 

 much preferred a trustworthy description of the life and 

 manners of this now extinct race to the ever-varying 

 theories of what a savage is supposed to have been or 

 not to have been, to have done or not to have done, 

 which abound in some of the most popular works on 

 anthropology and sociology. In the fourteen chapters of 

 his book Mr. Roth treats of the country, the form and 

 size of its inhabitants, the psychology of the natives, 

 their wars, their knowledge of fire, hunting, and fishing, 

 their nomadic life, their personal habits, their scientific 

 and artistic acquirements, their manufactures, their trade, 

 their customs, good and bad, their language, their osteo- 

 logy, and lastly their origin. 



It would be impossible to give an idea of the wealth 

 of information on all these subjects which Mr. Roth has 

 rendered accessible in this volume. It is well arranged, 

 and all his statements can readily be verified, for he 

 always give his references, and a complete index renders 

 its use easy at all times. The illustrations also show great 

 care and cleverness. 



Perhaps not the least important lesson which anthropo- 

 logists might learn from this book is the extremely uncer- 

 tain character of the accounts which visitors of Tasmania, 

 and even persons long settled in the island, have given us 

 of its inhabitants. This is a sore point with the students 

 of sociology, but it is high time that it should be thoroughly 

 probed. We shall confine our remarks to one subject only, 

 the Tasmanian religion, and, with the help of Mr. Roth, 

 we shall undertake to show that there is not one essential 

 point in the religion of the Tasmanians on which different 

 authorities have not made assertions diametrically opposed 

 to each another. 



No Religion. — Nothing staggers a savage — perhaps even 

 an educated man — so much as when he is asked what his 

 religion is. No wonder that many of the Tasmanians, 

 when asked that question, answered, with a broad grin, 

 " Don't know." What should we say if we were asked 

 whether we believed in Raegoo Wrapper or Namma ? 

 Widowson, however, assures us that the Tasmanians had 

 really no religion at all. " It is generally supposed," he 

 says, " that they have not the slightest idea of a Supreme 

 Being." Briton adds : " They do not appear to have any 

 rites or ceremonies, religious or otherwise." 



Dualism. — That the Tasmanians were Dualists, believ- 

 NO. 1090, VOL. 42] 



ing, like the followers of Zoroaster, in a good and an evil 

 spirit, is attested by numerous authorities. Leigh says : — 

 " Their notions of religion are very obscure. However, 

 they believe in two spirits : one, they say, governs the 

 day, whom they call the good spirit ; the other governs 

 the night, and him they think evil. To the good spirit 

 they attribute everything good, and to the evil spirit 

 everything hurtful." Jeffreys says : — " They have but a 

 very indistinct notion of their imaginary deity, who, they 

 say, presides over the day, an evil spirit making its 

 appearance in the night. This deity, whosoever it is, 

 they believe to be the giver of everything good." He 

 adds, however, that they appear to acknowledge no more 

 than one God, thus furnishing an exact parallel to the 

 Parsis, who, though they admit two spirits, acknowledge 

 Ormasd only as their true god. Milligan confirms this 

 view. He admits that the Tasmanians believed in many 

 spirits, but he adds that " they considered one or two 

 spirits to be of omnipotent energy, though they do not 

 seem to have invested even these last with attributes of 

 benevolence." Robinson maintains that " they were 

 fatalists (whatever that may mean in their language), and 

 that they believed in the existence both of a good and 

 evil spirit. The latter they called Raegoo Wrapper, to 

 whom they attributed all their afflictions, and they used 

 the same word to express thunder and lightning." 



Nature-Gods. — That the Tasmanians derived some of 

 their ideas of the godhead from the great phenomena of 

 Nature we have seen already from their identifying day 

 and night with their good and evil spirits. Thunder and 

 Lightning were their names for the evil spirit, or their 

 devil, as some observers call him. Besides day and 

 night, thunder and lightning, the moon also is mentioned 

 as an object of their worship. Thus, Lloyd tells us " that 

 it was customary among the aborigines to meet at some 

 time-honoured trysting-place at every full moon, a period 

 regarded by them with most profound reverence." In- 

 deed, he adds, "judging from their extraordinary 

 gestures in the dance, the upturned eye and out- 

 stretched arm, apparently in a supplicating spirit, I have 

 been often disposed to conclude that the poor savages 

 were invoking the mercy and protection of that planet as 

 their guardian deity." 



Devil-worship. — We now come to the testimony in 

 support of an exclusive devil-worship. Davies asserts 

 that the aborigines certainly believed in the existence of 

 an evil spirit, called by some tribes Namma, who has 

 power by night. Of him they are much afraid, and never 

 will willingly go out in the dark. But, he adds, " I could 

 never make out that they believed in a good deity, for 

 although they spoke of one, it struck me that it was what 

 they had been told ; they may, however, believe in one 

 who has power by day." 



Backhouse speaks in the same hesitating tone : — 



" These people," he says, " have received a few faint 

 ideas of the existence and superintending providence of 

 God ; but they still attribute the strong emotions of their 

 minds to the devil, who, they say, tells them this or that, 

 and to whom they attribute the power of prophetic com- 

 munication. It is not clear that by the devil they mean 

 anything more than a spirit ; but they say he lives in 

 their breasts, on which account they shrink from having 

 the breast touched." 



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