am dreams. Perhaps it
may also partly account for the association of the stars with the souls
of the dead. For if the dead appear to the living mainly in the hours of
darkness, it seems not unnatural to imagine that the bright points of
light which then bespangle the canopy of heaven are either the souls of
the departed or fires kindled by them in their home aloft. For example,
the Central Australian aborigines commonly suppose the stars to be the
camp-fires of natives who live on the banks of the great river which we
civilised men, by a survival of primitive mythology, call the Milky Way.
However, these rude savages, we are told, as a general rule "appear to
pay very little attention to the stars in detail, probably because they
enter very little into anything which is connected with their daily
life, and more especially with their food supply."[187] The same
observation which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen here make as to the natives
of Central Australia might be applied to most savages who have remained
in the purely hunting stage of social development. Such men are not much
addicted to star-gazing, since the stars have little or nothing to tell
them that they wish to know. It is not till people have betaken
themselves to sowing and reaping crops that they begin to scan the
heavens more carefully in order to determine the season of sowing by
observation of the great celestial time-keepers, the rising and setting
of certain constellations, above all, apparently, of the Pleiades.[188]
In short, the rise of agriculture favours the rise of astronomy.

[Sidenote: Creed of the South-eastern Australians touching the dead.]

But to return to the ideas of the Australian aborigines concerning the
dead, we may say of the natives of the south-eastern part of the
continent, in the words of Dr. Howitt, that "there is a universal belief
in the existence of the human spirit after death, as a ghost, which is
able to communicate with the living when they sleep. It finds its way to
the sky-country, where it lives in a land like the earth, only more
fertile, better watered, and plentifully supplied with game."[189] This
belief is very different from that of the Central Australian natives,
who think that the souls of the dead tarry on earth in their old
familiar haunts until the time comes for them to be born again into the
world. Of the two different creeds that of the south-eastern tribes may
be regarded as the more advanced, since it admi