, Mr. Tylor writes: "For a
long time after Captain Cook's visit, the information as to native
religious ideas is of the scantiest." This was inevitable, for our
information has only been obtained with the utmost difficulty, and under
promises of secrecy, by later inquirers who had entirely won the
confidence of the natives, and had been initiated into their Mysteries.
Mr. Tylor goes on in the same sentence: "But, since the period of
European colonists and missionaries, a crowd of alleged native names for
the Supreme Deity and a great Evil Deity have been recorded, which, if
really of native origin, would show the despised black fellow as in
possession of theological generalisations as to the formation and
conservation of the universe, and the nature of good and evil, comparable
with those of his white supplanter in the land." {23a} Mr. Tylor then
proceeds to argue that these ideas have been borrowed from missionaries.
I have tried to reply to this argument by proving, for example, that the
name of Baiame, one of these deities, could not have been borrowed (as
Mr. Tylor seems inclined to hold) from a missionary tract published
sixteen years after we first hear of Baiame, who, again, was certainly
dominant before the arrival of missionaries. I have adduced other
arguments of the same tendency, and I will add that the earliest English
explorers and missionaries in Virginia and New England (1586-1622) report
from America beliefs absolutely parallel in many ways to the creeds now
reported from Australia. Among these notions are "ideas of moral
judgment and retribution after death," which in Australia Mr. Tylor marks
as "imported." {23b} In my opinion the certainty that the beliefs in
America were not imported, is another strong argument for their native
character, when they are found with such striking resemblances among the
very undeveloped savages of Australia.

Savages, Mr. Hartland says in a censure of my theory, are "guiltless" of
Christian teaching. {24} If Mr. Hartland is right, Mr. Tylor is wrong;
the ideas, whatever else they are, are unimported, yet, _teste_ Mr.
Tylor, the ideas are comparable with those of the black man's white
supplanters. I would scarcely go so far. If we take, however, the best
ideas attributed to the blacks, and hold them disengaged from the
accretion of puerile fables with which they are overrun, then there are
discovered notions of high religious value, undeniably analogous to some
C