Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/32

 20 Presidential Address.

jects of incantations quickly pine away and die of fright. The Creator of all that has life on earth they believe to have been a gigantic blackfellow, who lived in Gippsland many centuries ago, and dwells among the stars. Many of the stars are named after people long since dead. This tribe has also the tradition of a deluge.

A writer of no great authority, Mr. Augustus Oldfield, in the 3rd volume of the Transactions of the Ethnological Society (1864), said of the aborigines of Australia that the number of supernatural beings that they acknowledge is exceedingly great ; every thicket, most watering places, and all rocky places abound with evil spirits. Heaven is the abiding place of two great divinities, one of whom has a son who performs many wonderful actions, but is spoken of with little reverence. The spirit of evil dwells in the nethermost regions and is the author of all the great calamities that befall mankind. He is represented as havinor lonsf horns and a tail.

The general result of all these testimonies is that while the idea of a maker of things might well have been one of those present in the savage mind, and while the con- venience of attaching an ethical value to religious belief might well have been an early discovery, there was no intimate connection between the two. The ethical value was equally attachable to the ghostly idea as to the idea of a maker, and equally or more convenient when so attached, for, as Mr. Lang says, the idea of a maker soon became associated with that of non-interference.

Mr. Lang's principal authority is Mr. Howitt, on whom he is justified in placing reliance; but Mr. Howitt himself does not appear to have attached all the importance to his statements that Mr. Lang derives from them, and Mr. Hewitt's statements are associated with others relating to the belief in spirits, the practices of wizards, and other observances that have to be considered in connection with the beliefs to which Mr. Lang attaches the special character