630 PROGRESS AND POSITION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES. 



to it, that it was the encroachments and treachery of the whites which 

 drove him away. 



The early inhabitants of the island of Tahiti appear to have had a 

 whole pantheon of gods and heroes representing the various operations 

 of nature. Even the Papuans have a legend in which the morning star 

 is personified acting as a thief. But it is needless to multiply instances. 

 Lord Bacon, who says "The earliest antiquity lies buried in silence 

 and oblivion. * * * This silence was succeeded by poetical fables, 

 and these at length by the writings we now enjoy, so that the concealed 

 and secret learning of the ancients seems separated from the history 

 and knowledge of the following ages by a veil or partition wall of 

 fables interposing between the things that are lost and those that 

 remain," has shown in his Wisdom of the Ancients that classical 

 mythology was in truth a vast system of nature worship, and in so 

 doing has done more than even he knew, for he has affiliated it to those 

 ideas which have been so commonly formed among rude and primitive 

 peoples. It is true, he says, fables in general are composed of ductile 

 matter, that may be drawn into great variety by a witty talent or an 

 inventive genius and be delivered of plausible meanings which they 

 never contained. But the argument of most weight with him, he con- 

 tinues, "is that many of these fables by no means appear to have been 

 invented by the persons who relate and divulge them, whether Homer, 

 Hesiod, or others; but whoever attentively considers the thing will find 

 that these fables are delivered down and related by those writers not 

 as matters then first invented and proposed, but as things received and 

 embraced in earlier ages. The relators drew from the common stock 

 of ancient tradition and varied but in point of embellishment, which is 

 their own. This principally raises my esteem of these fables, which I 

 receive not as the product of the age or invention of the poets, but as 

 sacred relics, gentle whispers, and the breath of better times, that from 

 the traditions of more ancient nations came at length into the flutes 

 and trumpets of the Greeks." 



Except that he supposes them to be a relic of better times, the poet's 

 dream of a golden age no doubt still ringing in his ears, Bacon had in 

 this, as in many other matters, a clear insight into the meaning of 

 things. 



Another idea that appears among very early and primitive peoples 

 and has had in all time a powerful influence on mankind is that of a 

 separable spirit. The aborigines of northwest central Queensland, 

 who have lately been studied to such excellent purpose by Dr. Walter 

 Both, the brother of a much-esteemed past officer of this section, are in 

 many respects low in the scale of humanity, yet they possess this idea. 

 They believe that the ghost or shade or spirit of some one departed can 

 so initiate an individual into the mysteries of the craft of doctor or medi- 

 cine man as to enable him, by the use of a death-bone apparatus, to 

 produce sickness and death in another. This apparatus is supposed to 



