Bunjil in a moral aspect. As I write this, I learn from my anthropological friend already referred to as a sympathetic partizan of Mr. Hartland's, that a large body of valuable testimonials to Bunjil has just arrived, in MS., into his hands. The testimonials, he says, "may be relied on as accurate;" and, knowing the source, which he mentions, I think the accuracy will be undisputed. The "originality"—that is the unborrowed character—of Bunjil is here upheld, which will not surprise Mr. Hartland, for he knows that the savage mind "is guiltless of Christian teaching." "Bunjil appears again and again in the tales as maintaining the moral law and punishing the wicked." (January 8, 1899.) There are "undesigned coincidences" with my view of Bunjil, and the collector of the evidence is unknown to me personally or by letter. Of course Mr. Hartland could not be aware of this testimony; but it clears Bunjil of the charge of being only an adulterous shape-shifting wirreenun, his aspect in the myth cited by Mr. Hartland, and in Myth, Ritual, and Religion by myself. Nor is he merely a star called Fomalhaut. I cannot say whether or not Bunjil presides over tribal mysteries. Mr. Howitt's opinion is, "after considering all the evidence now before me, that the tribes in Victoria had in a great measure lost the initiation ceremonies," perhaps in the advance from female kin to agnation (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xiv., p. 325). This is an interesting question. Such rites are in great vigour in Central Australia, where a man may marry a woman of his own totem, and children need not be of the totem of father or mother (Spencer and Gillen). Indeed, Mr. Howitt says that agnatic Queensland tribes have the rite in full vigour, which deprives his suggestion, as he remarks, of its strength. I trust, in any case, that the moral character of Bunjil is now rehabilitated by evidence which, I hope, will soon be published.
The best of all evidence is that of old savage songs or hymns; here it witnesses, in the poem already cited, to
