So strong is that desire, so inconceivable is the idea that death ends all, and divorces from us forever those we have loved and lost awhile, that the lower races of mankind have been pretty generally driven {45} to the conclusion that death is a mistake or due to a mistake. It is widely held that there is no such thing as a natural death. Men do of course die, they may be killed; but it is not an ordinance of nature that a man must be killed; and, if he is killed, his death is not natural. So strong is this feeling that when a man dies and his death is not obviously a case of murder, the inference which the savage prefers to draw is that the death is really a case of murder, but that the murder has been worked by witchcraft or magic. Amongst the Australian black fellows, as we are told by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, "no such thing as natural death is realised by the native; a man who dies has of necessity been killed by some other man or perhaps even by a woman, and sooner or later that man or woman will be attacked;" consequently, "in very many cases there takes place what the white man, not seeing beneath the surface, not unnaturally describes as secret murder; but in reality ... every case of such secret murder, when one or more men stealthily stalk their prey with the object of killing him, is in reality the exacting of a life for a life, the accused person being indicated by the so-called medicine man as one who has brought about the death of another man by magic, and whose {46} life must therefore be forfeited" (_Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 48).