Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/53

 Rh the publication of Mr. Brough Smyth's work in 1878, and in the most recent accounts, those of Mr. Matthews, who "is not a missionary, they have so far disappeared that he is only said to have created the tribesmen themselves." "They say," writes Mr. Matthews, or Mr. Crawley, "that Baiame created them and gave them the country." It does not follow that they don't say he created the country. Moreover, Mrs. Langloh Parker is later, and more expansive than Mr. Matthews.

Those poor missionaries! If they say that their savages are ancestor-worshippers, or have only a vague dread of ghosts, that is all very capital; if they credit their savages with higher beliefs, why, they are, I think, not so warmly welcomed. I myself prefer the evidence of philologists, Messrs. Greenway and Ridley, to the obiter dictum of a police officer, who does not say that Baiame did not create "the country," but that preference may be due to my deplorable bias, a thing not known among my opponents. Mr. Hartland, however, is incorrect in his facts, even if we are to prefer as evidence a police officer who does not know the native language, to missionaries—who do. Infinitely the most "biblical characteristics" of Baiame known to me are contained in notes taken in 1845 by Mr. Manning. This gentleman was encouraged by Goethe, then (circ. 1832) aged eighty-five, to examine Australian beliefs. Mr. Manning read his old notes of 1845-48 to the Royal Society of Victoria in 1882. My anthropological friend regards Mr. Manning's account as "quite worthless." I don't, because so many parts of it are corroborated. But even if it be "quite worthless," it disproves Mr. Hartland's contention that Baiame's "biblical characteristics," as reported by missionaries, constantly expanded down to the publication of Mr. Brough Smyth's book in 1878. For Mr. Manning's notes of 1845 are by far the most "expansive," nor did Mr. Ridley and others borrow from them, for they were lost, though finally recovered. In 1840-1848, Mr.