fide actions, and deliberate falsification from fact. The statements which I have made in these pages are the result of long-continued inquiries as well as personal observation. I must say for my aboriginal informants, that I have found them truthful in their statements to me whenever I have been able to check them by further inquiries, and in only one instance did I notice any tendency to enlarge the details into proportions beyond their true shape. Even this instance was very instructive. The man's information as to the customs of his tribe, and especially as to the initiation ceremonies, I found to be very accurate, but it was when he began to speak of the magical powers of the old men of the past generation that I found his colouring to be too brilliant, and more especially as regarded his tribal father, the last great warrior-magician of the tribe. In his exaggeration of the exploits of this man one might see an instructive example of how very soon an heroic halo of romance begins to gather round the memory of the illustrious dead.
It is not difficult to see how, amongst savages having no real knowledge of the causes of disease, which is the common lot of humanity, the very suspicion of such a thing as death from natural causes should be unknown. Death by accident they can imagine, although the results of what we should call accident they mostly attribute to the effects of some evil magic. They are well acquainted with death by violence, but even in this they believe, as among the tribes about Maryborough (Queensland), that a warrior who happens to be speared in one of the ceremonial fights has lost his skill in warding off or evading a spear, through the evil magic of some one belonging to his own tribe. But I doubt if, anywhere in Australia, the aborigines, in their pristine condition, conceived the possibility of death merely from disease. Such was certainly not the case with the Kurnai.
In all the tribes I refer to there is a belief that the medicine-men can project substances in an invisible manner into their victims. One of the principal projectives is said to be quartz, especially in the crystallised form. Such quartz crystals are always, in many parts of Australia, carried as part of the stock-in-trade of the medicine-man, and are usually
