And Yet There Is Reason To Believe
That From Accidents Of This Nature They Suffer More Than From Lightning.
Baneelon Once Showed Us A Cave, The Top Of Which Had Fallen In And Buried
Under Its Ruins, Seven People Who Were Sleeping Under It.
To descend; is not even the ridiculous superstition of Colbee related
in one of our journies to the Hawkesbury?
And again the following instance.
Abaroo was sick. To cure her, one of her own sex slightly cut her
on the forehead, in a perpendicular direction with an oyster shell,
so as just to fetch blood. She then put one end of a string to the wound
and, beginning to sing, held the other end to her own gums, which she rubbed
until they bled copiously. This blood she contended was the blood
of the patient, flowing through the string, and that she would thereby
soon recover. Abaroo became well, and firmly believed that she owed
her cure to the treatment she had received. Are not these, I say, links,
subordinate ones indeed, of the same golden chain? He who believes in magic
confesses supernatural agency, and a belief of this sort extends farther
in many persons than they are willing to allow. There have lived men
so inconsistent with their own principles as to deny the existence of a God,
who have nevertheless turned pale at the tricks of a mountebank.
But not to multiply arguments on a subject where demonstration
(at least to me) is incontestable, I shall close by expressing my firm belief
that the Indians of New South Wales acknowledge the existence
of a superintending deity.
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