INTRODUCTION 
3 
Australian researches, was to confirm his original information 
on all essential points. 
The general outcome of Spencer’s work on the aborigines 
of Australia, of whom in his long and laborious researches 
he had acquired a more extensive and exact knowledge than 
any man before him had acquired or than any man after him 
can hope to acquire of this dying race, was to place on record 
a full, detailed, and exact description of a people living in 
the Stone Age, without metals, without clothes, without 
houses, without domestic animals (except dogs), and not only 
without agriculture but without even the conception that 
seeds will grow and multiply if you plant them in the 
ground. For subsistence these folk depended entirely on 
the flesh of the animals which the men killed, and on the 
vegetable food which the women gathered from the trees and 
plants, supplemented by the seeds and roots which they 
grubbed up with their digging-sticks, but which it never 
occurred to them to plant again in the ground for the sake 
of ensuring, in a subsequent crop, a manifold return for the 
temporary sacrifice of the food which they had committed 
to the earth. As for sheep and cattle, they were necessarily 
destitute of them for the sufficient reason that no such 
creatures existed in Australia until they were imported from 
Europe. Thus the material condition of these savages was 
the simplest and lowest consistent with the existence of 
human life on earth. 
But if their material life was of the simplest possible kind, 
it was by no means so with their social and even intellectual 
life. For they had created a social system which, in regard 
to the relation of the sexes, was far more complicated and 
strict than any recorded in the history of civilized nations 
in any part of the world. And though their capacity to count 
did not exceed the first few digits, they had evolved an 
elaborate system of mythology based on the belief in t e 
