[177] We are occasionally warned not to underrate the intelligence of the aboriginal Australian.  As a matter of fact, there is more danger of its being overrated.  Thus it was long believed that what was known as the “terrible rite” (finditur usque ad urethram membrum virile)—­see Curr I., 52, 72—­was practised as a check to population; but surgeon-general Roth (179) has exploded this idea, and made it seem probable that this rite is merely a senseless counterpart of certain useless mutilations inflicted on females.

[178] Trans.  Eth.  Soc., New Ser., III, 248.

[179] Gerland (VI., 756) makes the same mistake here as Westermarck.  He also refers to Petermann’s Mittheilungen for another case of “romantic love.”  On consulting that periodical (1856, 451) I find that the proof of such love lay in the circumstance that in the quarrels so common in Australian camps, wives would not hesitate to join in and help their husbands!

[180] Surgeon-General Roth of Queensland does not indulge in any illusions regarding love in Australia.  He uses quotation marks when he speaks of a man being in “love” (180), and in another place he speaks of the native woman “whose love, such as it is.” etc.  He evidently realizes that Australian lovers are only “lewd fellows of the baser sort.”

[181] Journal of the Anthrop.  Inst., 1889.

[182] Macgillivray says (II., 8) that the females of the Torres Islands are in most cases betrothed in infancy.  “When the man thinks proper he takes his wife to live with him without any further ceremony, but before this she has probably had promiscuous intercourse with the young men, such, if conducted with a moderate degree of secrecy, not being considered as an offence....  Occasionally there are instances of strong mutual attachment and courtship, when, if the damsel is not betrothed, a small present made to the father is sufficient to procure his consent; at the Prince of Wales Islands a knife or a glass is considered as a sufficient price for the hand of a ‘fair lady,’ and are the articles mostly used for that purpose.”  I cite this passage chiefly because it is another one of those to which Gerland refers as evidence of genuine romantic love!

[183] I am indebted for many of the following facts to H. Ling Roth’s splendid compilation and monograph entitled The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo.  London, 1896.

[184] The Ida’an are the aboriginal population; in dress, habitations, manners, and customs they are essentially the same as the Dyaks in general.

[185] The above details are culled from Williams, pp. 145, 144, 38, 345, 148, 152, 43, 114, 179, 180, 344.  The editor declares, in a foot-note (182), that he has repressed or softened some of the more horrible details in Williams’s account.

[186] See Westermarck, 67, and footnotes on that page.

[187] If sentimentalists were gifted with a sense of humor it would have occurred to them how ludicrous and illogical it is to suppose that savages and barbarians, the world over, should in each instance have been converted by a few whites from angels to monsters of depravity with such amazing suddenness.  We know, on the contrary, that in no respect are these races so stubbornly tenacious of old customs as in their sexual relations.