fluid mass of beliefs both high and low, from the belief in a moral
creative being, a judge of men, to the pettiest fable which envisages him
as a medicine-man, or even as a beast or bird. In my opinion the higher
belief may very well be the earlier. While I can discern the processes
by which the lower myths were evolved, and were attached to a worthier
pre-existing creed, I cannot see how, if the lower faiths came first, the
higher faith was ever evolved out of _them_ by very backward savages.

On the other side, in the case of Australia, Mr. Tylor writes: "For a
long time after Captain Cook's visit, the information as to native
religious ideas is of the scantiest." This was inevitable, for our
information has only been obtained with the utmost difficulty, and under
promises of secrecy, by later inquirers who had entirely won the
confidence of the natives, and had been initiated into their Mysteries.
Mr. Tylor goes on in the same sentence: "But, since the period of
European colonists and missionaries, a crowd of alleged native names for
the Supreme Deity and a great Evil Deity have been recorded, which, if
really of native origin, would show the despised black fellow as in
possession of theological generalisations as to the formation and
conservation of the universe, and the nature of good and evil, comparable
with those of his white supplanter in the land." {23a} Mr. Tylor then
proceeds to argue that these ideas have been borrowed from missionaries.
I have tried to reply to this argument by proving, for example, that the
name of Baiame, one of these deities, could not have been borrowed (as
Mr. Tylor seems inclined to hold) from a missionary tract published
sixteen years after we first hear of Baiame, who, again, was certainly
dominant before the arrival of missionaries. I have adduced other
arguments of the same tendency, and I will add that the earliest English
explorers and missionaries in Virginia and New England (1586-1622) report
from America beliefs absolutely parallel in many ways to the creeds now