Aborigines of Tasmania. 
253 
sharpen. No one presumed to be more qualified than 
another to suggest or to administer a cure. The office 
of watching over the sick and dying was left to the 
women. After death, it was usual to burn the corpse. 
Legal authority was unknown to them in their primitive 
state. Instead of an elective or hereditary chieftaincy, 
the place of command was yielded up to the bully of the 
tribe. 
The moral apprehensions which prevailed among them 
were peculiarly dark and meagre. It is remarkable that 
a persuasion of their being ushered by death into another 
and a happier state of existence was almost the only 
remnant of a primitive religion which maintained a firm 
abode in their minds. As might be expected, however, 
their ideas of a life beyond the grave were entirely of a 
sensual kind. To be enabled to pursue the chase with 
unwearied ardour and unfailing success, and to enjoy in 
vast abundance and with unsated appetite the pleasures 
which they courted on earth, were the chief elements 
which entered into their picture of an elysium. 
While there was no term in their native languages to 
designate the Creator of all things, they stood in awe of 
an imaginary spirit, who was disposed to annoy and 
hurt them. The appearance of this malignant demon 
in some horrific form was especially dreaded in the season 
of night. 
There are two customs of a superstitious kind still 
retained among them ; neither, however, bearing the 
slightest reference even to low and misguided views of 
religious homage. The one is, an anxiety to possess 
themselves of a bone from the skull or the arms of their 
deceased relatives, which, sewed up in a piece of skin, 
they wear around their necks, confessedly as a charm 
against sickness or premature death. The other is a fear 
of pronouncing the name by which a deceased friend was 
