thumous
attention or worship. Thus it really seems impossible to show proof that
Australian gods grew out of Australian ghosts, a subject to which we
shall return.

(1) Howitt, Organisation of Australian Tribes, pp. 101-113.
"Transactions of Royal Society of Victoria," 1889.

Some supporters of the current theory therefore fall back on the
hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.(1) Chiefs, it is
argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of
these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the
very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John Lubbock and
Mr. Tylor have correctly argued that the soil of Australia has not yet
yielded so much as a fragment of native pottery, nor any trace of native
metal work, not a vestige of stone buildings occurs, nor of any work
beyond the present native level of culture, unless we reckon weirs for
fish-catching. "The Australian boomerang," writes Mr. Tylor, "has been
claimed as derived from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the
transition-stages through which it is connected with the club are to
be observed in its own country, while no civilised race possesses the
weapon."(2)

(1) See Prof. Menzie's History of Religion, pp. 16, 17, where a singular
inconsistency has escaped the author.

(2) Prim. Cult., i. 57, 67.

Therefore the Australian, with his boomerang, represents no degeneration
but advance on his ancestors, who had not yet developed the boomerang
out of the club. If the excessively complex nature of Australian rules
of prohibited degrees be appealed to as proof of degeneration from the
stage in which they were evolved, we reply that civilisation everywhere
tends not to complicate but to simplify such rules, as it also
notoriously simplifies the forms of language.

The Australian people, when discovered, were only emerging from
palaeolithic culture, while the neighbouring Tasmanians were frankly
palaeolithic.(1) Far from degenerating, the Australians show advance
when they supersede their beast or other totem by an eponymous human
hero.(2) The eponymous hero, however, changed with each generation, so
that no one name was fixed as that of tribal father, later perhaps to
become a tribal god. We find several tribes in which the children now
follow the FATHER'S class, and thus paternal kin takes the place of the
usual early savage method of reckoning kinship by the mother's side,
elsewhere preval