“I found traces of this same belief in a number of tribes north of the Ingarda, but everywhere the belief seemed to be sporadic; that is to say, some persons believed in it and others did not. Some individuals could tell the animal or plant from which they or others were descended, while others did not know or in some cases denied that conception was so caused. There were to be met with, however, some beliefs of the same character. A woman of the Buduna tribe said that native women nowadays bear half-caste children because they eat bread made of white flour. Many of the men believed that conception is due to sexual intercourse, but as these natives have been for many years in contact with the whites this cannot be regarded as satisfactory evidence of the nature of their original beliefs. (M79) “In some tribes further to the north I found a more interesting and better organised system of beliefs. In the Kariera, Ñamal, and Injibandi tribes the conception of a child is believed to be due to the agency of a particular man, who is not the father. This man is the _wororu_ of the child when it is born. There were three different accounts of how the _wororu_ produces conception, each of them given to me on several different occasions. According to the first, the man gives some food, either animal or vegetable, to the woman, and she eats this and becomes pregnant. According to the second, the man when he is out hunting kills an animal, preferably a kangaroo or an emu, and as it is dying he tells its spirit or ghost to go to a particular woman. The spirit of the dead animal goes into the woman and is born as a child. The third account is very similar to the last. A hunter, when he has killed a kangaroo or an emu, takes a portion of the fat of the dead animal which he places on one side. This fat turns into what we may speak of as a spirit-baby, and follows the man to his camp. When the man is asleep at night the spirit-baby comes to him and he directs it to enter a certain woman who thus becomes pregnant. When the child is born the man acknowledges that he sent it, and becomes its _wororu_. In practically every case that I examined, some forty in all, the _wororu_ of a man or woman was a person standing to him or her in the relation of father’s brother own or tribal. In one case a man had a _wororu_ who was his father’s sister. The duties of a man to his _wororu_ are very vaguely defined. I was told that a man ‘looks after’ his _wororu_, that is, performs small services for him, and, perhaps, gives him food. The conceptional animal or plant is not the totem of either the child or the _wororu_. The child has no particular magical connection with the animal from which he is derived. In a very large number of cases that animal is either the kangaroo or the emu.”(339)