Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/39

Rh orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet, which they call "beiar," and it is doubtful whether they discriminate even with the eye between the more delicate hues.

A race of men devoid of the faculty of abstraction would necessarily be very deficient in religious conceptions. This is the case with the Australians, who do not show the faintest traces of a belief in the existence of supernatural beings, and therefore do not worship idols, perform sacrifices, or offer prayers. The ghosts they fear are the spirits of the dead, who, not having been properly buried, are doomed to walk the night. But, however great may be the terror inspired by these nocturnal spooks, no attempt is made to propitiate them; the easiest way of warding off their attacks is to huddle as closely as possible round the camp fire. Disease and death are not regarded as natural events, but dreaded as the work of the sorcerers of hostile tribes, whose influence can be counteracted only by sorcerers of their own tribe. In parts of southern and western Australia a somewhat higher stage of religious evolution has produced a vague sort of demonism with a crude cosmology, in which the founder of the tribe figures as the creator of the world. Here we have an example of ancestor worship as a primitive cult marking the transition from demonism to deism. The Australians have no myths or sagas in the sense of fictitious narrations or traditions of heroic achievements and historical events, but only the simplest tales of magic and wizardry, such as are common to the childhood of the race, and refer almost exclusively to the metamorphosis of men into animals. Thus a bad man was put to death by having spears hurled into him, and thereby changed into an Echidna aculeata, or porcupine ant-eater. To the minds of the natives this origin explains the mysterious character of this nocturnal creature, which wanders noiselessly about, and on the slightest suspicion of



danger vanishes into the earth as by enchantment. The koala, or phascolarctus, is also a magically transformed black man, and a charming story is told of the friendship between a child and a "wonge" (poisonous serpent), which the parents killed, whereupon the child pined away and died. This tale is told in a German Märchen, and the incident is said to have actually happened not long since in New England.