Referring to the inhabitants of Australia, Latham acknowledges that the general opinion is, in fact, that they have not yet commenced to shape the rudest elements of a _religion_,[178] “an opinion,” he says, “which causes the idea that their intellects are too sluggish even for the maintenance of superstition.” It is certainly true that, in the American expedition under Captain Gray, it was thought that some religious ideas could be perceived among them; but it appears from the same account that the song which constituted all this apparent religion, had been brought from far by strangers, and adopted by the natives,--doubtless, by other Australians, who had already been influenced by the Christian ideas of the white men, or the Buddhist principles of the Malays. To relate the history of the introduction of an idea among a people is, in reality, to declare and prove that this idea did not exist there before, which is sufficient for us if we can be assured of the fact. The testimony of missionaries[179] is, besides, consonant with that which we have just said; and we may remark on the importance of assertions coming from men whose whole study is to discover, in the people whom they desire to convert, ideas analogous to those which they endeavour to propagate. “They have no idea of a Divine Being,” says one of these men; “they appear to have no comprehension of the things they commit to memory,--I mean especially as regards religious subjects.” “What can we do,” says another, “with a nation whose language possesses no terms corresponding to _justice_ or _sin_, and to whose mind the ideas expressed by these words are completely strange and inexplicable?” As to Central Africa, we confine ourselves to relating a few facts relative to this want of religious belief, gathered from different points in the periphery of the vast triangle, almost unexplored and unknown, which is described by lines joining together Senegal, Zanzibar, and the Cape.