Some people believe that the black fellow has no religion. This, I really believe, is chiefly owing to the general tendency to so name only our own particular belief, lumping all the others together under the name of “superstition.” “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is another man’s doxy,” as Bishop Warburton once said. Mr. Ramsey Smith, head of the South Australian Department of Public Health, declares the Australian native to be saturated with religion, and, truly, if we would comprehend anything of a people’s beliefs, we must know everything that there is to be known of themselves, their surroundings, and their lives. There is a spiritual religion which strives for purity and goodness for its own sake alone. But most religions, including that of the ancient Jews, have been mainly based on a fear of consequences, which governs alike both civil and personal character. The laws of the black fellow—in spite of the name he has for being at once dirty, primitive, and debased—are, particularly in dealing with all matters of sanitation, even more stringent than those of the Jew, and though the reason he will give you for destroying every scrap that remains over from any animal he has eaten will be that—if an enemy should get hold of it, he would cause him serious injury, or even loss of life; still, in all probability, it was the law of cleanliness which first gave rise to such a belief. The black fellow’s Bible is his stock of fables, repeated from mouth to mouth, as were the tales of Homer. Most of these legends enforce some lesson or moral, though how much of the actual tales themselves is believed, and how much is recognized as being old wives’ fables, especially concocted to point a moral, it would be hard to say. But this we do know: that the black fellow’s gods are numerous, consisting alike of good and bad spirits, round which are hung legends of the Deluge; of the manner in which the sky is supported; of the origin of the sun—which is a woman—and the moon—which is a man—and why they wax and wane; of the meaning of comets, stars, and eclipses; while his entire moral code is embodied in a series of elaborate laws and ceremonies in connection with phratries and totems, child betrothal, infanticide, and marriage,—in connection with which the laws are extraordinarily strict—corroborees and initiation, from which last ceremony all the women of the tribe are warned away—under the penalty of death—by the “bullroarer,” or “bummer.”