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When the crane married the kangaroo rat there was no fire in the country. One day when the crane was rubbing two pieces of wood together he saw a faint spark fly out, and then a slight smoke. Split your stick," said the kangaroo rat," and place in the crevice grass and bark so that a single spark may kindle a flame."

After much rubbing flame sprang out, and so they discovered how to make fire. They determined to keep the knowledge to themselves, but suspicion arose as to the secret art by which they made their food more palatable than others could, and at a corroboree of all the animals their fire-stick was stolen, and so all the tribes came to possess the secret of fire.

This is the Australian version of the Great Flood.

MODERN

STONE

It had all been

[blocks in formation]

There was no water. swallowed by a great frog. If he could

FROM CENTRAL
AUSTRALIA

the animals

be made to laugh he would have to disgorge it, so at a great corroboree all did their best to amuse him. They failed until the eel began to dance. Then as he wriggled and writhed the frog could contain himself no longer. He burst out laughing, and out of his jaws rushed the waters and overspread the earth. Only islands stood up here and there above the flood, but the pelican steered a great canoe among them and took the survivors on board.

Most primitive peoples feel that men and animals are essentially similar, and in their folklore men, trees, and

animals shade into one another, are changed into one another, or are sometimes one and sometimes the other in a fashion that is puzzling to civilized readers. Yet even in medieval Europe we have records of the trials of animals (usually in their absence) for murder or theft, followed sometimes by the sentence of excom

munication by the Church; and, in The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano cries out against Shylock that there dwells in him the spirit of a wolf, "hanged for human slaughter." The stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses are no doubt late and literary renderings of primitive European folklore-tales told round their hearths perhaps by cave-dwellers. A SPEAR-HEAD Readers of the Metamorphoses will easily recognize a likeness in the tales FLAKED FROM to these from Australian folklore.

CHIPPED AND

A PIECE OF

GREEN BOTTLE

Two old women killed a kangaroo. GLASS. WEST They hid it and told the hunters who AUSTRALIA asked what they were having for dinner that they had only mussels. But the child they had with them kept crying for kangaroo. So the hunters stole it, and refused to give even a little to the hungry child. Then the old women sang up a hailstorm which would have killed the men if they had not been turned into birds.

A widow and her children were struggling over the desert. Some tribesmen overtook them, and the woman besought their help. They could not stop, they said; they were going to a corroboree. But in the middle of the corroboree the woman appears. The children are dead of thirst. Since you were in such haste to get here," she says,

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stay here. Be trees."

And the other tribes she turned into crows, black swans, kangaroo rats, and other animals.

The trees still stand round the place of the corroboree, proving that the story is true.

Primitive man exercises his imagination to account for the habits and peculiarities of animals, and the origin of the constellations. The Australian native tells us why the sun travels across the sky. She is a woman who went with her little son to dig yams. Somehow they became separated, and she wandered right round the edge of the earth seeking him till she came up the other side, and having formed a habit of travelling, she continued to do this.

The moon is a man. At new moon he is starving, so he goes on a fishing expedition and grows fatter, until he appears as full moon. Shooting stars are the souls of the dead; the Milky Way is a river full of fish. The Pleiades are a group of maidens making corroboree music for the young men who form Orion's Belt. Thunder is the voice of a god, as to the Greeks it was the voice of Zeus, or the noise of his chariot wheels rumbling over the heavens.

Goomblegubbon the bustard was jealous of Dinewan the emu on account of her wings. So she hid her own wings and said to the emu: "All the birds have wings. You, their queen, ought to be able to do without them. I have cut mine off. See that the birds do not make me their queen."

Dinewan the emu went and cut off her wings and then came back, but the bustard laughed and taunted her.

Dinewan said: "Why do you have twelve puny children? Look how big mine are; but then I have only two. If you kept only two children and gave them all the food they would grow into giants."

So Goomblegubbon the bustard killed all her children but two, and the emu laughed at her.

Since that time emus do not fly, and bustards have only two eggs each season.

Remote tribes of Eskimo have a great dread of all the tribes with which they have not come into direct contact, and always describe them as wicked and dreadful. Some of them, they say, have only one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and Odysseus, as we know from the Odyssey, came across such a people in the Cyclopes. Even as late as the fourteenth century the Englishman Sir John Mandeville brought home from his travels in Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, India, and elsewhere reports quite as strange.

When cave-man in Europe was driven by fever, flood, or famine to seek a new dwelling he set forth with his stone weapons in good order, followed by his wife and children, and keeping a sharp look-out for the animals which might furnish an evening meal, and those which he might have to fight for his life and theirs. It was necessary that he should be encumbered only with his weapons, his bow or his spear, his knives, and his clubs; all the little things that make a home his wife would carry, as well as any children who could not run by her side. This is a list given by Grey the traveller of the collection in a West Australian woman's bag, and we may imagine our cave-woman ancestress in these islands setting out with some such another: a flat stone to pound roots with, earth to mix with the pounded roots, quartz to make spears and knives, stones for hatchets, prepared cakes of gum for making and mending weapons, needles of kangaroo shin-bone, opossum hair for belts, mussel shell for hair-cutting, knives, axes, pipeclay, red ochre, yellow ochre, bark to carry water

in, waist-bands and spare ornaments, pieces of quartz carried as amulets, Banksia cones or pieces of fungus for use as tinder or for carrying fire from place to place, grease, roots collected during the day, spare weapons which the husband does not wish to carry, skins in course of preparation for garments, and other articles. Primitive peoples have many devices for getting fire. The following is the account given by Captain Cook of

FIRE-STICK

Another stick is twirled rapidly in one of the grooves

the method he found in use among the Australian natives.

"To produce fire they take two pieces of soft, dry wood; one is a stick about eight or nine inches long, the other piece is flat; the stick they shape into an obtuse point at one end, and pressing it upon the other turn it nimbly by holding it between both their hands, as we do a chocolate mill, often shifting their hands up and then moving them down upon it to increase the pressure as much as possible. By this method they get fire in less than two minutes."

The European reader who tries to follow out these directions will take longer.

Prehistoric man in Europe was, as we have seen, no mean artist, and a similar skill in painting and drawing is found among the Australian natives, the Bushmen of South Africa, the natives of New Guinea, and the American Indians, those in the stage of Old Stone man excelling as he did in the life-like representation of

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