If the natives had not their mind turned that way, if they were not used to identify every new member of their society with some ancestor of their own, could they do it so easily in the case of white men, who were so different from them, and could not present any striking physical similarity? Of course this inference is not a cogent one. But putting side by side all the facts we have gathered: the belief in reincarnation of the dead; the easy recognition of dead relatives in white men; and the promptitude with which, in some cases, the latter were given their places in society, their hunting-grounds, their parents, relatives, and so on--all this allows us to affirm with a high degree of probability that a new-born child was looked upon as a reincarnated member of the tribe, and that an intimate kinship between him and his parents was considered to be established on the ground of kinship in a previous life. Is not the parental affection which was bestowed on some of the white men one of the most astonishing traits in the evidence in question? Of course white men were considered to be immediate reincarnations, or rather a return of the dead in ghost condition; whereas rebirth was a much longer process, and was, perhaps, considered as reincarnation of a long-dead ancestor. Consequently the ties of kinship between a white man and his "relatives" were the repetition of an actual relation which had already existed for the native in his life. Whereas if a reborn child is considered, as we here assume, to be a "previous" kinsman, this kinship is based upon a relation obtaining in some former existence. But it may be urged that if we deal with aboriginal collective psychology no very clear ideas can be expected. The only thing that we assumed here was that the ideas of rebirth, combined with some other specific Australian beliefs, suggest very strongly that children might have been both held, and felt to be, kindred, on the ground that they come with some sort of ready-made personality; and on the ground that, as E. S. Hartland argues, rebirth is the result of some spontaneous action of the creature to be reborn. I think that if we ask for the source of the widespread belief in white men being returned ghosts, and especially for the readiness and ease with which they were accepted into the family and into the tribe--we must presuppose some beliefs and institutions to account for it, and the explanation proposed above seems to me very plausible.[625] But the best example of the ideas of kinship of the magic order is to be found among the tribes studied and described by W. E. Roth. [621] Compare above, p. 216.