The native of New South Wales believes that particular aspects and appearances of the heavenly bodies predict good or evil consequences to himself and his friends.  He oftentimes calls the sun and moon ‘weeree,’ that is, malignant, pernicious.  Should he see the leading fixed stars (many of which he can call by name) obscured by vapours, he sometimes disregards the omen, and sometimes draws from it the most dreary conclusions.  I remember Abaroo running into a room where a company was assembled, and uttering frightful exclamations of impending mischiefs about to light on her and her countrymen.  When questioned on the cause of such agitation she went to the door and pointed to the skies, saying that whenever the stars wore that appearance, misfortunes to the natives always followed.  The night was cloudy and the air disturbed by meteors.  I have heard many more of them testify similar apprehensions.

However involved in darkness and disfigured by error such a belief be, no one will, I presume, deny that it conveys a direct implication of superior agency; of a power independent of and uncontrolled by those who are the objects of its vengeance.  But proof stops not here.  When they hear the thunder roll and view the livid glare, they flee them not, but rush out and deprecate destruction.  They have a dance and a song appropriated to this awful occasion, which consist of the wildest and most uncouth noises and gestures.  Would they act such a ceremony did they not conceive that either the thunder itself, or he who directs the thunder, might be propitiated by its performance?  That a living intellectual principle exists, capable of comprehending their petition and of either granting or denying it?  They never address prayers to bodies which they know to be inanimate, either to implore their protection or avert their wrath.  When the gum-tree in a tempest nods over them; or the rock overhanging the cavern in which they sleep threatens by its fall to crush them, they calculate (as far as their knowledge extends) on physical principles, like other men, the nearness and magnitude of the danger, and flee it accordingly.  And yet there is reason to believe that from accidents of this nature they suffer more than from lightning.  Baneelon once showed us a cave, the top of which had fallen in and buried under its ruins, seven people who were sleeping under it.

To descend; is not even the ridiculous superstition of Colbee related in one of our journies to the Hawkesbury?  And again the following instance.  Abaroo was sick.  To cure her, one of her own sex slightly cut her on the forehead, in a perpendicular direction with an oyster shell, so as just to fetch blood.  She then put one end of a string to the wound and, beginning to sing, held the other end to her own gums, which she rubbed until they bled copiously.  This blood she contended was the blood of the patient, flowing through the string, and that she would thereby soon recover.  Abaroo became well, and firmly