carvings sufficiently, the men give him a new name, which must not be revealed to the uninitiated, and they hand to him. a little bag containing one or more small stones of crystal quartz; this bag he will always carry about his person, and the stones must not be shown to the uninitiated on pain of death. This concludes the first part of the performance.

The “boombat" is next conveyed, blindfolded, to a large camp at a distance of several miles, no woman being near, and food is given to him, which he eats still with his eyes cast down; here they keep him for eight or ten days, and teach him their tribal lore by showing him their dances and their songs; these he learns, especially one song of which I can tell nothing further than that it is important for the boy to know it. These songs, they say, were given them by Baiamai, the great Creator. At night, during this period, the "boombat" is set by himself in secluded and darksome places, and all around the men make hideous noises, at which he must not betray the least sign of fear. At some part of the ceremony a sacred wand is shown him; of this Ridley says:— "This old man, Billy, told me, as a great favour, what other blacks had withheld as a mystery too sacred to be disclosed to a white man, that " dhurumbulum," a stick or wand, is exhibited at the Bora, and that the sight of it inspires the initiated with manhood. This sacred wand was the gift of Baiamai. The ground on which the Bora is celebrated is Baiamai's ground. Billy believes the Bora will be kept up always all over the country; such was the command of Baiamai."

It

Another conspicuous part of the inner Bora customs is the knocking out of one of the upper front teeth of the “boombat." The tooth is then conveyed from one sub-tribe to another until it has made the circuit of the whole tribe; on its return it is given to the owner or kept by the head man. is said that an ancient shield (cf. the sacred Ancilia of Rome), handed down from past ages, and regarded as almost equal to Daramulun himself, accompanied the tooth. This toothbreaking, however, is not practised by some of the larger tribes; but instead of it there is circumcision, cutting of the hair, &c.

on the ground for weeks, it may be, getting only a very little food and water now and then. When he wishes to go outside, the old men carry him over the circle-mound. With this compare the sacredness of the pomarium circuit of ancient Rome. One black boy told me that when he was initiated, he joined the Bora in the month of August, and did not get away till about Christmas. When the blacks in charge of the sacred circle at last bade him rise from his recumbent position, he said he was so weak that he staggered and fell.

All these formalities being now completed, the "boombat's " probation is at an end. They now proceed, all of them together, to some large water-hole, and, jumping in, men and boys, they wash off the colouring matter from their bodies, amid much glee, and noise, and merriment, and, when they have come out of the water, they paint themselves white.

Meanwhile, the women, who have been called to resume their attendance, have kindled a large fire not far off, and are lying around it, with their faces covered as at the first; the two old men, who were the original initiators, bring the boy at a run towards the fire, followed by all the others, with voices indeed silent, but making a noise by beating their boomerangs together; the men join hands and form a ring round the fire, and one old man runs round the inside of the ring beating a heelaman or shield. A woman, usually the boy's own mother, then steps within the ring, and, catching him under the arms, lifts him from the ground once, sets him down, and then retires; everybody, the boy included, now jumps upon the decaying red embers, until the fire is extinguished.

Thus ends the Bora; the youth is now a man, for his initiation and his instruction are over. But, although these are formalities observed in admitting a youth into the tribe, yet in the Bora, as in Freemasonry, the novice does not become a full member all at once, but must pass through several grades, and these are obtained by attending a certain number of Boras; here also, as in Africa, restrictions as to food are imposed, which are relaxed from time to time, until at last the youth is permitted to eat anything he may find: thus the process of qualifying for full membership may extend over two or three years. Then he becomes an acknowledged member of the tribe, undertakes all the duties of membership, and has a right to all its privileges.

I have thus finished my description of the Bora ceremonies, and, as a sort of introduction to that description, I gave at the outset a condensed account of similar observances both in Africa and in India.

Now, when I cast my eye over the Bora and its regulated forms, I feel myself constrained to ask, "What does all this mean?" I, for one, cannot believe that the Bora, with all its solemnities (for the rites were sacred, and the initiated were bound not to divulge what they had seen and done), is a meaningless, self-developed thing; still less that the same thing can have developed spontaneously in Australia and in farthest Africa; I prefer to see in it a symbolism covering ancestral beliefs, a symbolism intelligible enough to the

Kushite race at first, but now little understood, but yet superstitiously observed, by their Australian descendants.

Accordingly I now proceed to what I regard as the most important part of this inquiry, for I shall attempt to show that in many respects the Bora corresponds with the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient world. If we can prove that the germ ideas which underlie the Australian Bora as it has always been celebrated among the aborigines are the same as those in many religions of antiquity, and that these same ideas present themselves in ceremonies of similar import among nations now widely separated in place, I think we have established a strong presumption that there is a common source from which all these things have sprung, and that there is a community of origin on which this community of belief is founded.

And here I wish to enlist the sympathy and assistance of this intelligent audience. There are among you many who have a full and accurate knowledge of the religious systems of Africa and India, and who can therefore give valuable aid in tracing analogies sufficient to build up my argument to the dimensions of substantial proof. I ask, these gentlemen to assist me, either now by oral remarks, or afterwards in any form which they may prefer. My present theme is a small contribution to an argument for the unity of the human race as to its origin, and while I work in the Australian field, which is as yet little known, I shall gratefully receive any help which may come from fields that have been long explored.

I now offer to you such analogies as my limited knowledge permits me to refer to :

(A.) In the Bora there are two circles, the one is less sacred, for the women may be present there, although only on the outskirts; in it certain preparatory things are done in order to bring the "boombat's" mind into a fit state of reverential awe for the reception of the teaching in the other circle, the adytum, the penetralia,-where the images of the gods are to be seen; the women and the uninitiateď must not approach this inner circle, for it is thrice holy; "Procul este, profani."

(a.) In the earliest religions, the circle is the invariable symbol of the sun, the bright and pure one, from whose presence darkness and every evil thing must flee away. Thus we have the disc as the symbol of the sun-god in Egypt, Chaldæa, Assyria, Persia, India, China. This fact is so well known that it is needless to multiply examples. Those who are within the circle are safe from the powers of evil. The

sacredness of the circle in those early ages is seen from the
Chaldæan name (Genesis xxxi. 47), "the circle of witness,"
a name given to a solemn compact of friendship witnessed by
that celestial orb which looks down on and observes all the
deeds of men. In Persia, to this day, in the southern parts of
it, which were originally inhabited by a Hamite race of an
almost purely negroid type, there are to be seen on the road-
sides large circles of stones which the tradition of the country
regards as set there by the Caous, a race of giants, that is, of
aboriginals. Their name closely resembles the name Kush,
as does also Cutch at the north of the Indus, and other
geographical names along the Arabian seas. Then in the
classic nations, both in Greece and Italy, some of the most
famous temples were circular in form, especially the Pantheon
at Athens; and, at Rome, the temple of Vesta, the goddess of
the sun-given, eternal fire. At Rome also, for 100 from
years
the foundation of the city, the worship of the gods was cele-
brated in the open air (cf. the Bora), often in sacred groves;
and there also the temple of Janus, the oldest and most vene-
rated of the Roman gods, was merely a sacred enclosure upon
which no building stood till the time of the First Punic War.
The pomarium, or circuit of the walls of Rome, was a sacred
ring, and the Circus was consecrated to the sun, and was open
to the sky. In Britain, too, the fire worship of the Druids led
them to construct ring temples in various places, and especially
at Stonehenge, where there are two rings as in the Bora, but
concentric. Even the rude Laplanders, who are sprung from
the same Turanian race which was one of the earliest elements
in the population of Babylonia, make two circles when they
sacrifice to the sun, and surround them with willows; they
also draw a white thread through the ear of the animal to be
sacrificed, and white, as we shall presently see, is the sun's
livery.

(B.) In the Bora, the two rings, both of them sacred, communicate with each other by means of a narrow passage, in which are earthen representations of certain objects of worship; the inner contains the images or symbols of the gods carved on trees, and the novice is so placed in the outer ring that he faces the passage and the shrine of the gods; he is turned to the east (see note, page 162).

(b.) The inner shrine is an arrangement common to all religions. At Babylon, in the temple of Belus, which was built in stages, the worshipper had to pass through these seven stages of Sabæism before he reached the shrine; this was the topmost of all, and contained a golden image of the god; each of these stages was devoted to the worship of one

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of the Babylonian gods. So also, in the Bora, the worshipper advances by stages along the passage leading from the one circle to the other, and pays his devotions to each of the images in succession. In Greece and in Rome the roofed temples were commonly arranged in two parts, an inner and an outer, and the statue of the god was so placed that a worshipper, entering by the external door, saw it right before him. At the very ancient temple of Dodonæan Zeus, in Greece, the god was supposed to reside in an oak tree, and it is quite possible that the Xoanon, or wooden image of the god, was here, as in other grove worship, merely a carved piece of oak as in the Bora. In this sense Festus gives Fustis decorticatus as an equivalent for delubrum. The student of Biblical archæology will also remember the Asherah of the Israelite idolaters, the consort of the sun-god Baal; this was a wooden pillar or statue of the goddess which could be cut down and burned. Such a pillar our black fellows also have been known to erect; for on one occasion several men of a tribe which is well known to me were seen to cut down a soft cedar tree; they dressed it with their hatchets, and cut the end of it into the rude figure of a head and face; they then carried it some distance down the river to a sandy spot, and, setting it up there like a pillar, they danced in a circle around it. This was certainly an act of worship, the same as many other acts of worship in the heathen world. Was it merely a happy thought on the part of these black fellows, or undesigned coincidence, which led them to do so; or was it a portion of an ancestral form of worship brought from other lands?

(C.) In the Bora, the novice in the outer circle has his body all painted over with red, but at the close of his novitiate he washes in a pool, is thereby cleansed, and then paints himself all white. The other members of the tribe paint themselves red and white for the ceremony; they, too, at the close, wash in the pool and retire white like the "boombat." This transformation is to them a source of much rejoicing.

(c.) Among the black races the colour red was the symbol of evil; and so Plutarch tells us that the Egyptians sacrificed only red bullocks to Typhon, and that the animal was reckoned unfit for this sacrifice if a single white or black hair could be found on it; in certain of their festivals the Egyptians assailed with insults and revilings any among them who happened to have red hair, and the people of Coptos had a custom of throwing an ass down a precipice because of its red colour. The god Typhon was to the Egyptians the embodied cause of everything evil, malignant, destructive, man-hating in the economy of nature, just as Osiris, the bright