fensive and putrid clay
can be thus worshipped for the spirit that once was its tenant"(!!).
Angas was an uneducated scribbler, but what shall we say on finding
his sentimental view accepted by the professional German
anthropologists, Gerland (VI., 780) and Jung (109)? Anyone familiar
with Australian life must suspect at once that this custom is simply
one of the horrible modes of punishment devised for women. Curr says
the woman is "_obliged by custom_" to carry her dead child, and he
adds: "I believe that this practice is insisted on when a young mother
loses her first born, as the death of the child is thought to have
come about by carelessness." To suppose that Australian mothers who
usually kill all but two of their six or more children could be
capable of such an act for sentimental reasons is to show a logical
faculty on a par with the Australian's own. This point has already
been discussed, but a further instance related by Dr. Moorehouse (J.D.
Wood, 390), will bring the matter home:

"A female just born was thus about to be destroyed for
the benefit of a boy about four years old, whom the
mother was nourishing, while the father was standing
by, ready to commit the deed. Through the kindness of a
lady to whom the circumstances became known, and our
joint interference, this one life was saved, and the
child was properly attended to by the mother, although
she at first urged the necessity of its death as
strenuously as the father." "In other parts of the
country," Wood adds, "the women do the horrible work
themselves. They are not content with destroying the
life of the infants, but they eat them."

ROMANTIC AFFLICTION

Here, as in several of the alleged cases of African sentimentality, we
see the great need of caution and detective sagacity in interpreting
facts. To take another instance: Westermarck (503), in his search for
cases of romantic attachment and absorbing passion among savages,
fancies he has come across one in Australia, for he tells us that
"even the rude Australian girl sings in a strain of romantic
affliction--

'I never shall see my darling again.'"

As a matter of fact this line has no more to do with the "true
monogamous instinct, the absorbing passion for one," than with Julius
Caesar. Eyre relates (310, 70) that when Miago, the first native who
ever quitted Perth, was taken away on the _Beagle_ in 1838, his
_mother_ s