The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-09-09

pOAt SO HIS SOkSEHlAASAit' NO hASS spy
 cially prescribe for patients, as thera- peutical knowledge, where such exists, Is the common property or the tribe. Their professional duty among these most primitive, albeit interesting, Aus tralian blacks is to produce or cure ac- cident or disease by means Of charms and so forth. Their medical educa- tion is purely magical. In the country round Boulia, for in- stance, the intending practitioner starves himself for three or four days in lonely place, and, becoming light headed, is visited by Malkari, a nature spirit, who effects his initiation into the ranks of tribal medicine men by insert | ing in his inside some small pebbles, quartz crystals or pieces of bone. An other initiating god is Karnmari, who appears to a man whom he intends to | initiate in the shape of water snake. As such he will come swimming along at nightfall on the surface of the water and will frighten the novice, who is probably fishing in complete ignorance of the honor intended him. The men runs home in panic and awakes from his nights sleep feeling far from we'll. ] His sickness increases for nearly a week. A medicine man then attends him, and by dint of clever sleight-of- hand removes from his inside the iden- tical bone. or stone, or quartz crystal, | that Karnmari put there. The water snake, it is supposed, had pointed a death charm at him. The ndning of this charm serves to initiate him.
 | Again, a ghost haunts the graves of
 the dead and is known to the Boulia blacks as Mona" Moma inserts a bone or pebble into man. who thus comes to be respectfully known as the possessor of the bone or pebble.'' An other nature spirit is believed to haunt Cloncurry district, and at night may be heard scratching the bark and snapping
 the branches of the bough shelters un- der which the natives sleep. Sometimes
 he is not in the way when wanted, and | then aspirants are compelled to under
 take very long journey to a certain
 river, where dwells tribe that is able
 to initiate according to this spirits l ideas. t-.-. ssa .g...,,. | But the process is long, and involves, among other things, the murder and subsequent smoke-curing of the novice, He is, however, sure to recover. .eventu- ally, and succeed admirably in his pro- fessiOn. The ''possessors" of the bone" however they may have come by it, are co-powerful, and are much feared by
 their fellow tribesmen. They are not ostentatious, we are told, a medicine man being distinguished by no special insignia save a small bag in which his talismans. death charms and other "cre- dentials" are carried. These he hands about. much as white man shows let | ters from influential people, and his friends taking note of them, he gets to be talked about and grows quietly fla nous without undue advertisement. 1t | is remarkable, where all are impostors, that among the native aboriginals of Australia there should exist quacks as shrewd as any in civilized countries. The artificial production of disease, especially of wasting disease terminat- ing in death, is effected as in classical means of chants, dirges, the burning of and mediaeval times in Europe, by the eff1gy of the doomed person, or of parts of his animal economy, such as | his hair. @r {, Incurable madness is supposed to be caused by the touch of a charm formed of unequal lengths of opossum string, colored red and enyeloped in tea tree. A ''chiruke'' Is piece of pointed human shin bone, which, when buried deep | under the victims sleeping place, causes him or her to pine away. Some times a death charm, in the shape of
 long needle, is made from human bone,
 and when fixed, on haft resembles a small spear. The operator, who is not necessarily medicine man, points this spear in the direction of his victim at
 night breathing deeply forth and in | wards as he slowly thrusts it back wards and forwards in space. The spear is then buried under fireplace, and in
 short time the victims blood begins
 to turn bad" and he pines away. It
 is now the turn of the medicine man to cure him, and this is brought about by suction.
 ! The medicine man sucks some espe- cially affected part of the invalid, and 1 finally gets the charm into his mouth, ejecting it through one of his nostrils
 by dine of severe taps on the back of
 his head. Of course, any sick person
 will be told that he has been pointed at
 and that some charm is inside him. In certain cases this is a good sized cord,
 which the medicine man pretends to ex-
 tract. A relic of this imposture was
 found in Europe in the Middle Ages.
 where whole class of quacks throve by
 pretending to extract stones from their
 patients heads.
 The medicine men of the Australian
 aboriginals are typical of the class
 among the savages. They are mainly terrorists and conjurors, and "a bad lot" Among the North American Indi-
 ans they are treated with great respect
 and, as Bell pointed out, they form a secret society with exclusive privileges
 and "exercise terrible influence i'll de-
 grading the people,"
 It is curious to find that, as in Aus
 tralia, the red Indian medicine men are
 chiefly concerned to do positive hsrm.
 In cooperation with good and bad spir-
 it's they bring about the deaths of men
 or dogs at distance. Among the Ojib-
 ways they are a kind of brokers in ven-
 geance and coward or a hypocrite who
 wishes to be eovertly avenged upon an
 enemy will bribe his tribal medicine
 man to employ the medical attendant
 of his victim. Then. if the victim dies,
 the instigators remain unsuspected and
 the actual perpetrator of the crime