[156] F. Mueller (212-13) gives the details of West Australian corrobborees which are too obscene to be cited here.  See also the testimony in Hellwald (134-35) based on the observations of Oldfield, Koler, M’Combie, etc., and a number of other authorities cited by Waitz-Gerland, VI., 754-55.  Curr says (I., 128) that at the corrobborees men of different tribes lend their wives to each other.

[157] Journal Anthrop.  Inst., XXIV., 169.  See also Waitz, VI., 774; Macgillivray, II., 8; Hasskarl, 82.  They have a peculiar rattle with mystic sculpturing, and Eyre says that its sound libertatem coeundi juventuti esse tum concessam omnibus indicat.  Maclennan (287) cites G.S.  Lang, who cites the fact that the old men get most of the young women.  Connubium profecto valde est liberum.  Conjuges, puellae, puellulae cum adolescentibus venantur.  Pretium corporis poene nullius est.  Vendunt se vel columbae vel canis vel piscis pretio.  Inter Anglos et aborigines nihil distat.

[158] Journal Anthrop.  Inst., XX., 53.

[159] Revue d’Anthropologie. 1882, p. 376.

[160] A.W.  Howitt, Jour.  Anthr.  Hist. XX., 60-61.  Fison and Howitt, 289; Smithsonian Reports, 1883, p. 67.  Details are given which cannot be reproduced here.  Boys participate in these orgies.

[161] The details given by Roth are too disgusting for reproduction here.  They vie with the loathsome practices of the Kaffirs and the most debauched Roman emperors, while some of them are so vile that it seems as if they could have been suggested only by the diseased brain of an erotomaniac.  The most degraded white criminal that ever took up his abode among savages would turn away from them with horror and nausea, yet we are asked 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.