AUSTRALIAN IDEA OF GOD, 301 
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, fur 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, 
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 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.” 
