AUSTRALIAN IDEA OF GOD. 



301 



pressioti that we are dealing with stagnation or incom- 

 plete 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 degenerated 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 ex- 

 plain 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 hypothe- 

 sis of a previous standpoint, now sunk into oblivion, en- 

 ables 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, when 

 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 sup- 

 position is easier and more natural that the other natives 

 should have degenerated, with their eternal wanderings, 

 than that the former, fixed by the more convenient terri- 

 tory, should have raised themselves." 



