MEMOIR 
3 * 
and profound research could make it. Sir James Frazer, 
as might be expected from one who had actually served as 
their co-worker, though from the other side of the globe, 
gave whole-hearted support to their findings, even when 
these extended from fact to theory; and the second edition 
of The Golden Bough (1900), which in so many ways modifies 
and, one may truly say, enlarges the outlook of the first 
edition, might be said to place the Arunta in the very centre 
of the picture. When in due course he receives his copy of the 
work in question, Spencer is frankly delighted, rejoicing alike 
in the encyclopaedic range of the matter and in the literary 
form. It is but human, however, that he should find less to 
admire in the writings of authors such as Andrew Lang or 
Durkheim, whose views about Australian origins are not so 
sympathetic; and it has certainly to be admitted that he, and, 
with him and through him, Frazer, were in a better position 
to pronounce on the facts at first hand. Again there later 
appears a rival on the spot in the shape of the German 
missionary Strehlow, who working in the south-west of the 
Arunta country, a part at the time unvisited by Spencer, 
obtains from his converts a somewhat different version of the 
native beliefs, and one which Spencer suspects to be less 
authentic, because more contaminated with civilized, not to 
say Christian, ideas than his own. On such matters, then, of 
disputable interpretation which are inevitable in the study 
of the mental life of mankind Spencer discourses freely in 
numerous letters to Frazer as well as to Henry Balfour, 
myself, and others; but this is not the occasion on which to 
go into technical questions. 
In 1901 Spencer and Gillen embarked on the last expedi¬ 
tion that they were to make together, and spent twelve months 
in the field, traversing the Continent from railhead at Ood- 
nadatta along the telegraph line to Powell Creek, and then 
branching off eastwards to Borraloola on the Gulf of Carpen- 
