Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/139

 Socrates and the master spirits of his time the human mind has advanced. Shakspeare and a few others comfort us with the thought that it has not retrograded, but no other land can show the flood of light that shone in Greece, when her scanty freemen raised painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and philosophy to heights perpetually aimed at, seldom reached, and never surpassed. Leaving as beyond discussion in these pages the unspeakable blessings conferred upon man by Christianity, the world has little to show except in mechanical contrivances and discoveries, flowing from the inductive system. Recorded gains indeed are never lost. Material advantages are innumerable, but mental transformation, by way of heightened faculty, no one will venture to claim as the result of man's exertions. The bare idea of John Stuart Mill confronted by the easy superiority of Socrates would drive such a thought from the most boastful.

Mr. Howitt, reflecting on the condition of a group of persons all connected by blood, has evolved a theory that originally "brothers had their wives in common, or a group of sisters their husbands in common," and that from this promiscuous intercourse the savage mind engendered an elaborate code which made such intercourse impossible. It was common to many Australian tribes to have a comprehensive term which included many relations. Thus a father's brother's child and a mother's sister's child on the River Peake in South Australia bore the same relative term to their cousin. At Lake Alexandrina, in the same colony, the cousin bore one appellation if male, and another if female. As there were terms to comprehend a grandfather's or grandmother's brothers and sisters, and as every living relation bore a significant term reciprocated by another, the