ent in Australia. In one of these tribes, dwelling
between the Glenelg and Mount Napier, headmanship is hereditary, but
nothing is said of any worship of the ghosts of chiefs. All this social
improvement denotes advance on the usual Australian standard.(3) Of
degeneration (except when produced recently by European vices and
diseases) I know no trace in Australia. Their highest religious
conceptions, therefore, are not to be disposed of as survivals of a
religion of the ghosts of such chiefs as the Australians are not shown
ever to have recognised. The "God idea" in Australia, or among the
Andamanese, must have some other source than the Ghost-Theory. This is
all the more obvious because not only are ghosts not worshipped by the
Australians, but also the divine beings who are alleged to form
links between the ghost and the moral god are absent. There are no
departmental gods, as of war, peace, the chase, love, and so forth. Sun,
sky and earth are equally unworshipped. There is nothing in religion
between a Being, on one hand (with a son or sons), and vague mischievous
spirits, boilyas or mrarts, and ghosts (who are not worshipped), on the
other hand. The friends of the idea that the God is an ancient evolution
from the ghost of such a chief as is not proved to have existed, must
apparently believe that the intermediate stages in religious evolution,
departmental gods, nature gods and gods of polytheism in general once
existed in Australia, and have all been swept away in a deluge of
degeneration. That deluge left in religion a moral, potently active
Father and Judge. Now that conception is considerably above the
obsolescent belief in an otiose god which is usually found among
barbaric races of the type from which the Australians are said to have
degenerated. There is no proof of degeneracy, and, if degeneration has
occurred, why has it left just the kind of deity who, in the higher
barbaric culture, is not commonly found? Clearly this attempt to
explain the highest aspect of Australian religion by an undemonstrated
degeneration is an effort of despair.

(1) Tylor, preface to Ling Roth's Aborigines of Tasmania, pp. v.-viii.

(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231.

(3) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 277, 278.

While the current theory thus appears to break down over the deities
of certain Australian tribes and of other low savages to be more
particularly described later, it is not more successful in dealing with
what we have