d to believe that the savages learned all their
vices from the whites!

[162] _Mittheil des Ver. fuer Erdkunde zu Halle_, 1883, 54.

[163] Westermarck overlooks these vital facts when he calmly assumes
(64, 65) that the guarding of girls, or punishment of intruders,
argues a regard for chastity. His entire ignoring of the superabundant
and unimpeachable testimony proving the contrary is extraordinary, to
put it mildly. Dawson's assertion (33) that "illegitimacy is rare" and
the mother severely punished, which Westermarck cites (65), is as
foolish as most of the gossip printed by that utterly untrustworthy
writer. As the details given in these pages regarding licentiousness
before marriage and wife-lending after it show, there is no possible
way of proving illegitimacy unless the child has a white father. In
that case it is killed; but that is nothing remarkable, as the
Australians kill most of their children anyway. That a regard for
chastity or fidelity has nothing to do with these actions is proved by
the fact cited from Curr (I., 110) by Westermarck himself (on another
page--131--of course!) that "husbands display much less jealousy of
white men than of those of their own color," and that they will more
commonly prostitute their wives to strangers visiting the tribe than
to their own people. I have no doubt that the simple reason of this is
that the whites are better able to pay, in rum and trinkets.

[164] _South Australia_, Adelaide, 1804, p. 403. The part author, part
editor of this valuable book is not to be confounded with J.S. Wood,
the compiler of the _Natural History of Man_.

[165] See also the account he gives (I., 180) of the report as to
aboriginal morals made in the early days of Victoria by a commission
of fourteen settlers, missionaries, and protectors of the aborigines.
The explorer Sturt (I., 316) even found that the natives became
indignant if the whites rejected their addresses.

[166] See also a very important paper on this subject by Howitt in the
_Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol. XX., 1890,
demonstrating that "in Australia at the present day group marriage
does exist in a well-marked form, which is evidently only the modified
survival of a still more complete social communism" (104). Regarding
the manner in which group marriage gradually passed into individual
proprietorship, a suggestive hint may be found in this sentence from
Brough Smyth (II., 316): When women are carried