and of either granting or denying it? They
never address prayers to bodies which they know to be inanimate, either
to implore their protection or avert their wrath. When the gum-tree in a
tempest nods over them; or the rock overhanging the cavern in which they
sleep threatens by its fall to crush them, they calculate (as far as their
knowledge extends) on physical principles, like other men, the nearness and
magnitude of the danger, and flee it accordingly. And yet there is reason
to believe that from accidents of this nature they suffer more than from
lightning. Baneelon once showed us a cave, the top of which had fallen in
and buried under its ruins, seven people who were sleeping under it.

To descend; is not even the ridiculous superstition of Colbee related in
one of our journies to the Hawkesbury? And again the following instance.
Abaroo was sick. To cure her, one of her own sex slightly cut her on the
forehead, in a perpendicular direction with an oyster shell, so as just to
fetch blood. She then put one end of a string to the wound and, beginning
to sing, held the other end to her own gums, which she rubbed until they
bled copiously. This blood she contended was the blood of the patient,
flowing through the string, and that she would thereby soon recover. Abaroo
became well, and firmly believed that she owed her cure to the treatment
she had received. Are not these, I say, links, subordinate ones indeed,
of the same golden chain? He who believes in magic confesses supernatural
agency, and a belief of this sort extends farther in many persons than they
are willing to allow. There have lived men so inconsistent with their own
principles as to deny the existence of a God, who have nevertheless turned
pale at the tricks of a mountebank.

But not to multiply arguments on a subject where demonstration (at least to
me) is incontestable, I shall close by expressing my firm belief that the
Indians of New South Wales acknowledge the existence of a superintending
deity. Of their ideas of the origin and duration of his existence; of
his power and capacity; of his benignity or maleficence; or of their own
emanation from him, I pretend not to speak. I have often, in common with
others, tried to gain information from them on this head; but we were
always repulsed by obstacles which we could neither pass by or surmount.
Mr. Dawes attempted to teach Abaroo some of our notions of religion, and
hoped that she would thereby be induc