HORN EXPEDITION—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
41 
on our journey did we see natives so dirty in their habits, so squalid in their mode 
of life, and so devoid of the usual cheery demeanour as at Kermannshurg. 
It is unfortunate that with increasing opportunities of association with the 
whites there is everywhere being manifested amongst the natives in Australia a 
corresponding degeneracy in the manufacture of their native articles or even in 
the entire discontinuance of their own handiwork in favour of the products of 
civilisation, but nowhere was this degeneration more obvious that at the Mission 
Station. Beyond the fact that nearly all the women wore more or less 
fragmentary garments of some kind, almost the only evidence, in themselves, 
that testified to the former missionary influence, was the predominance 
amongst the natives of scriptural names often in German form. Various 
individuals answered to such names as Matthias, Johannes, Jacobus, 
Daniel, Nathaniel, Samuel, Nebuchadnezzar, Mii’iam, Rebecca, Magdalene, 
and so on. It had been, I understood, customary for those who had become 
attached to the establishment to conform to the institutions of baptism and 
marriage according to the rites of the Lutheran Church. In the latter respect, 
however, they had not continued to follow St. Paul’s injunction, with the tenor of 
which I presume they had been made familiar, for I saw one native, formerly the 
orthodox husband of one wife, who was now the happy possessor of four. 
Close by the Station buildings were the remains of what had been once a well- 
tilled garden, containing young date palms, several varieties of other fruit 
trees and all the appliances for watering from a well sunk at the edge of the bed 
of the Finke River, and I was told that the manual work connected with its main¬ 
tenance had been done by the blacks under supervision. Neither here nor else¬ 
where in Australia, however, have I ever seen or ever heard of attempts made by 
the natives to cultivate for themselves. 
I was informed by those left in charge of the Station that about 100 natives 
were in the habit of making their camp near the Station their head quarters, but 
barely half that number were present at the time of our visit. Some however 
were absent, for the time, on hunting or visiting expeditions. Their camp was, as 
usual, in the sandy river bed, a few boughs roughly thrown together forming low 
and altogether inefficient shelters. 
Under the order and supervision of the Missionaries, for the sake both of 
shelter and decency, some fifteen to twenty well-built “ humpies ” or dome-shaped 
constructions of boughs, which really were capable of affording some protection 
against the weather, had been constructed on the raised bank of the river. These, 
7 
