_Religious Ideas._--Their religious ideas were exceedingly meagre and uncertain. To Mr. Horton's enquiries, in 1821, they answered, "don't know," with broad grins: he was probably not understood. They appear to have had no religious rites, and few congenial ideas: they dreaded darkness, and feared to wander from their fires: they recognised a malignant spirit, and attributed strong emotions to the devil. The feats imputed to his agency, do not much differ from the sensations of night-mare: they believed him to be _white_--a notion supported by very substantial reasons, and suggested by their national experience: this idea must have been modern. They ascribed extraordinary convulsions to this malignant power, and to his influence they traced madness. Lord Monboddo might have contrived their account of the creation: they were formed with tails, and without knee-joints, by a benevolent being: another descended from heaven, and compassionating the sufferers, cut off the tail; and with grease softened the knees. As to a future state, they expected to re-appear on an island in the Straits, and "to jump up white men." They anticipated in another life the full enjoyment of what they coveted in this. These scraps of theology, when not clearly European, are of doubtful origin: nothing seems certain, except that they dreaded mischief, from demons of darkness. Though they had no idols, they possessed some notions of statuary: it was sufficiently rude. They selected stones, about ten inches high, to represent absent friends; one of greater dimensions than common, Backhouse observed that they called Mother Brown. Persons of sanguine minds are apt to attribute to them religious ideas, which they never possessed in their original state. The notion of a spirit, however, exists on the continent: in this, the Tasmanian black participated. Their ideas were extremely indefinite, and will not refute, or much support the belief, that the recognition of a Divinity is an universal tradition.