INTRODUCTION 
5 
men to place themselves at the point of view of uncivilized 
humanity. 
The same curious belief as to the birth of children 
furnishes the clue to the otherwise apparently inexplicable 
totemic system of the Central Australian aborigines; for, like 
savages in many parts of the world, they had a system of 
totemism, which indeed formed, we may almost say, the very 
core of their social and intellectual life. But unlike totems 
elsewhere, which are usually inherited by children from their 
father or their mother, the totems of the Central Australian 
aborigines are not derived from their parents at all but are 
determined by the spot where the mother first felt her womb 
quickened, because there, they believe, the spirit of the infant 
entered into her from the nearest natural object, whether 
stone or tree or what not, in which the congregated spirits of 
one particular totem (for example, a kangaroo or an opossum) 
had been waiting to pounce out on women and be born of 
them again into the world. Such natural objects, each 
haunted by spirits of a particular totem, are known as local 
totem centres; and if a woman first feels the child stirring in 
her womb near one of them which is haunted, for instance, by 
spirits that had the kangaroo for their totem, then her child, 
when it is born, will also have the kangaroo for its totem; 
and so on with all the rest. 
And their unquestioning faith in the survival of the spirits 
of the dead has affected the life of the tribes in another way; 
it has endowed them with a drama. For a considerable part 
of their abundant leisure is devoted to representing dramati¬ 
cally the legendary doings of their ancestors, who are 
believed to have roamed about the country creating all the 
more conspicuous landmarks, whether rocks or trees or 
pools, which vary the otherwise monotonous and dreary ex¬ 
panse of the Central Australian wilderness; and although, so 
far as I remember, the authors do not affirm it, we may 
