shaman, or whatever he may be called, is the worst and wickedest of all ghosts.  How, then, the Fuegians, who are not proved to be ancestor-worshippers, evolved out of the malignant ghost of an ancestor a being whose strong point is morality, one does not easily conceive.  The adjacent Chonos ’have great faith in a good spirit, whom they call Yerri Yuppon, and consider to be the author of all good; him they invoke in distress or danger.’  However starved they do not touch food till a short prayer has been muttered over each portion, ’the praying man looking upward.’[4] They have magicians, but no details are given as to spirits or ghosts.  If Fuegian and Chono religion is on this level, and if this be the earliest, then the theology of many other higher savages (as of the Zulus) is decidedly degenerate.  ’The Bantu gives one accustomed to the negro the impression that he once had the same set of ideas, but has forgotten half of them,’ says Miss Kingsley.[5]

Of all races now extant, the Australians are probably lowest in culture, and, like the fauna of the continent, are nearest to the primitive model.  They have neither metals, bows, pottery, agriculture, nor fixed habitations; and no traces of higher culture have anywhere been found above or in the soil of the continent.  This is important, for in some respects their religious conceptions are so lofty that it would be natural to explain them as the result either of European influence, or as relics of a higher civilisation in the past.  The former notion is discredited by the fact that their best religious ideas are imparted in connection with their ancient and secret mysteries, while for the second idea, that they are degenerate from a loftier civilisation, there is absolutely no evidence.

It has been suggested, indeed, by Mr. Spencer that the singularly complex marriage customs of the Australian blacks point to a more polite condition in their past history.  Of this stage, as we said, no material traces have ever been discovered, nor can degeneration be recent.  Our earliest account of the Australians is that of Dampier, who visited New Holland in the unhappy year 1688.  He found the natives ’the miserablest people in the world.  The Hodmadods, of Mononamatapa, though a nasty people, yet for wealth are gentlemen to these:  who have no houses, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth....  They have no houses, but lie in the open air.’  Curiously enough, Dampier attests their unselfishness:  the main ethical feature in their religious teaching.  ’Be it little or be it much they get, every one has his part, as well the young and tender as the old and feeble, who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty.’  Dampier saw no metals used, nor any bows, merely boomerangs (’wooden cutlasses’), and lances with points hardened in the fire.  ’Their place of dwelling was only a fire with a few boughs before it’ (the gunyeh).

This description remains accurate for most of the unsophisticated Australian tribes, but Dampier appears only to have seen ichthyophagous coast blacks.