Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/56

 30 missionary version which has reached me. For example, it goes far beyond the account received by Mr. Ridley (who is a missionary) about 1854-1858, and published by him in Lang's Queensland (1861). If this missionary did anything, he did not expand, but greatly reduced the "biblical characteristics" of Mr. Manning's account. No doubt he neither reduced nor expanded, but repeated what the natives had told him about Baiame as a Creator.

All this is conclusive against Mr. Hartland's theory of missionary expansions between 1840 and 1878, but it is not conclusive against early borrowing. Here I am anxious to allow the utmost "law" to the borrowing theory. If this belief were a popular tale, a Märchen like Cinderella, told by children or old native women, but despised by the men (as such tales, aniles fabulæ, often are among savages and peasants), I would at once come into the borrowing theory as far as the most probable. A single escaped convict might infect the whole Australian continent with Cinderella or Puss in Boots, though oddly enough real analogues of our Märchen do not seem to be found among the natives. Now, when Mr. Manning read his notes of 1845 to the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1882, he appealed to a friend, Mr. John Mann, for corroboration. He did not get it. Mr, Mann said that "he had never met one aborigine who had any true belief in a Supreme Being," Baiame was not up to Mr. Mann's standard. On the other hand, "when cross-examined," the blacks always admitted that they had got their knowledge from Europeans. When cross-examined they never contradict their interrogator's ideas. Mr. Mann's ideas were obviously negative. Mr. Palmer, however, corroborated Mr. Manning. Mr. Mann's view was that the curiosity of the blacks urged them to