Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/16

 2 world than ours. They are not only in an extremely rudimentary stage of material culture, but they show few if any signs of ever having been in a much higher condition. No people have less settled homes; destitute of the forms of agriculture practised by the natives of the other South Sea Islands, the tribes wander over large expanses of country, urged by the necessities of the chase, and attracted, now here, now there, by the ripening of wild berries or by the presence of edible roots. Houses they have none, and their temporary shelters or gunyehs are of the rudest and most fragile character. Nothing can more clearly demonstrate their barbarous condition than the entire absence of native pottery and of traces of ancient pottery in the soil. They have scarcely made any progress in domesticating animals. Their government is a democracy of the fighting men, tempered by the dictates of Birraark or sorcerers, and by the experience of the aged. Yet their social customs, rules of marriage, and etiquette are of a complexity apparently more ancient than even the similar rules among North American Indians, Kaffirs, and Polynesians. We have already seen (Chapter III.) that their conception of Nature and of the world is peculiar for the intensity of the belief in the universal kinship and equality of all things in the world as known to them, though some of the blacks have a comparatively scientific theory of the sun. The mythical gods, if gods they can be called, of the natives of Victoria are described thus in