HORN EXPEDITION-ANTHROPOLOGY, 
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unmodified ceremonies, might have preserved for us an invaluable record of their 
inner life and of the motives of their strange customs and superstitions. 
Lacking the immense advantages, for investigation, of this intimate and 
continuous association of the early settlers with the natives, the inquirer of more 
recent times, though possibly better trained in the methods of observation, 
experiences to the full the disadvantages that have been mentioned even if he 
should escape actual hostilities in remoter parts. Moreover in Central Australia, 
particularly, the urgent necessity for rapid movements, on account of the all- 
important question of water supplies, not unfrequently precludes a sulllciently long 
stay in certain localities to allow of the growth of that mutual confidence which 
must precede all attempts to extract reliable information. 
Thus ethnological science in Australia has fared badly. Those who might 
have spoken have I’emained silent, while, too often, the trained observer has lacked 
the opportunities for observations. To no country is the remark of a distinguished 
traveller more appropriate than to Australia—that “ as a rule the men who know 
don’t write, and the men who write don’t know,” and, if it must be admitted also, 
that ethnological investigations have been too little considered as part of the 
functions of an exploring party in Australia it must also be admitted that the 
difficulties in the way of these, as of other biological investigations, are very great 
on such flying expeditions. With the necessity of frequently covering long 
distances, by forced marches in waterless tracts, the quest for water supplies from 
sources either of unknown or of doubtful permanency being the first and 
paramount consideration; with the difficulties of transport of food in regions 
where no indigenous supplies exist, to say nothing of the carriage of collecting 
material and materials collected, the representatives of the various branches of 
natural history have often little scope for their eflbrts or the observer little time 
for deliberate and systematic observations when a detention might imperil the 
safety of the whole party. Though it is true that some of these difliculties have 
been minimised in recent years by the use of camels, enough still remain to foi ni 
substantial obstacles to scientific exploration in Central Australia. 
If these are the kinds of difficulties which must meet the first explorer of 
unknown regions they become merely those of another kind as the spread of 
settlement proceeds. For the older order quickly changes. Rites, ceremonies, 
customs, traditions soon become modified, obsolete, or their signilicance wholly lost, 
and thus a real ignorance of the subject on which the natives are questioned is 
added to the difficulty of making the meaning understood of the questions 
themselves. 
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