In the low-lying land which borders Halifax Bay in the colony of Queensland there is to be found an edible root called the bulgaroo which, at the time of the European Spring equinox, after the heavy rains which begin in the month of February, betrays its presence by sending forth shoots of a bright and tender green colour. For some occult reason this root is preferred by the aboriginal inhabitants to the choicest delicacies which the white man, notwithstanding his cultivated taste in the matter of food and drink, can supply. Accordingly every year the black man, if employed, seeks his master’s permission for a month’s sojourn in the land of the bulgaroo. It is well known to all who have lived in Queensland that the black man is a keen observer of the heavenly bodies and is much distressed by the sight of an eclipse of the sun or moon, from which it may be inferred that he rejoices when the sun and moon are not obscured. Whether, strictly speaking, he can be described as a sun worshipper has not been determined, but it is believed that the disclosure of these particulars will help incidentally to solve this as well as the larger problem under discussion. The coincidence of the Spring equinox with the resurrection of the said bulgaroo from its dark retreat under the earth, and of both events with the assembling of the aboriginal tribes and of their partaking together of what may not unfitly be described as the root of ages (for in all probability we have here a vegetable food known to the black man’s ancestors long before they emerged from a pre-human archetype); above all, the addition to the bulgaroo banquet of human flesh whenever it may be safely had, and the marked preference for those portions of the human body which, like the heart, are essential to life, and therefore, as they suppose, are the better fitted to stimulate and increase the eater’s physical courage and efficiency; to which must also be added the attendant dance and song of corroboree and the more secret and mysterious bora meeting whereat, after due proof has been given, both oral and experimental of the candidate’s fortitude, he is admitted to the full privileges of manhood by a solemn rite of initiation: all these ceremonial acts, whose significance it is impossible to misinterpret and to exaggerate, strengthened and not weakened (as might be supposed by a superficial observer) by the fact that at the antipodes Spring synchronises with European Autumn, establish a strong presumption that the continent of Australia affords the veritable solution of the great problem of the origin of Christian ceremonial observance. Nor is this surprising when we remember that according to an eminent German archæologist, Dr. Buttel-Reepen,[7] the Australian aborigines are the direct descendants of the propithecanthropi, i.e. pre-ape-men or common progenitors of apes and men, “since their foot had not yet undergone the definite change from a grasping organ to a supporting apparatus.” Nay