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Inquiries into Human Faculty
get, some leopards, and others monstrous creatures. Some held in veneration certain
unclean fowls, etc. Neither did they content themselves with worshipping the said
creatures when alive, but also adored the very skins of them when they were dead and
stuffed with straw.”
[Australia.]—Mr. Woodfield records the following touching anecdote
in a paper communicated to the Ethnological Society, as occurring in an
unsettled part of West Australia, where the natives rank as the lowest race
upon the earth
“During the summer of 1858-9 the Murchison river was visited by great numbers of
kites, the native country of these birds being Shark’s Bay. As other birds were scarce, we
shot many of these kites, merely for the sake of practice, the natives eagerly devouring
them as fast as they were killed. One day a man and woman, natives of Shark’s Bay, came
to the Murchison, and the woman immediately recognising the birds as coming from her
country, assured us that the natives there never kill them, and that they are so tame that
they will perch on the shoulders of the women and eat from their hands. On seeing one
shot she wept bitterly, and not even the offer of the bird could assuage her grief, for she
absolutely refused to eat it. No more kites were shot while she remained among us.”
The Australian women habitually feed the puppies they intend to rear
from their own breasts, and show an affection to them equal, if not
exceeding, that to their own infants. Sir Charles Nicholson informs me
that he has known an extraordinary passion for cats to be demonstrated by
Australian women at Fort Phillip.
[New Guinea Group.]—Captain Develyn is reported (Bennett,
Naturalist in Australia, p. 244) to say of the island of New Britain, near
Australia, that the natives consider cassowaries “to a certain degree
sacred, and rear them as pets. They carry them in their arms, and entertain
a great affection for them.”
Professor Huxley informs me that he has seen sucking-pigs nursed at
the breasts of women, apparently as pets, in islands of the New Guinea
Group.
[Polynesia.]—The savage and cannibal Fijians were no exceptions to
the general rule, for Dr. Seemann wrote me word that they make pets of
the flying fox (bat), the lizard,
