urpose, they carry a light with them and set fire
to dry bushes as they go along.

VENERATION FOR CRYSTAL STONES.

The natives of South-western Australia likewise pay a respect, almost
amounting to veneration, to shining stones or pieces of crystal, which
they call Teyl. None but their sorcerers or priests are allowed to touch
these, and no bribe can induce an unqualified native to lay his hand on
them.

The accordance of this word in sound and signification with the Baetyli
mentioned in the following extract from Burder's Oriental Customs (volume
1 page 16) is remarkable:

And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had
put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the
top of it, and he called the name of that place Bethel. Genesis 28:18.

From this conduct of Jacob and this Hebrew appellation, the learned
Bochart, with great ingenuity and reason, insists that the name and
veneration of the sacred stones called Baetyli, so celebrated in all
Pagan antiquity, were derived.

These Baetyli were stones of a round form, they were supposed to be
animated by means of magical incantations, with a portion of the Deity;
they were consulted on occasions of great and pressing emergency as a
kind of divine oracle, and were suspended either round the neck or some
other part of the body.

...

That this veneration for certain pieces of quartz or crystal is common
over a very great portion of the continent is evident from the following
extracts from Threlkeld's Vocabulary, page 88:

Mur-ra-mai: The name of a round ball, about the size of a cricket-ball,
which the Aborigines carry in a small net suspended from their girdles of
opossum yarn. The women are not allowed to see the internal part of the
ball; it is used as a talisman against sickness, and it is sent from
tribe to tribe for hundreds of miles on the sea-coast, and in the
interior; one is now here from Moreton Bay, the interior of which a black
showed me privately in my study, betraying considerable anxiety lest any
female should see its contents.

After unrolling many yards of woollen cord made from the fur of the
opossum, the contents proved to be a quartz-like substance of the size of
a pigeon's egg, he allowed me to break it and retain a part. It is
transparent like white sugar-candy; they swallow the small crystalline
particles which crumble
off as a preventative of sickness. It scratches glass, and does not
efferve