A palpable ingredient of mind appears in the laughter of
savages at the white man's ideas about the beginnings and
the endings of things. The inquirer into their beliefs may
present himself to them as a quite unreasonable sceptic,
grubbing at the very roots of things which sensible men
accept as self-explanatory. The members of a tribe in
Central Australia (Arunta tribe) were immensely tickled by
the question how their remote ancestors came by the sacred
stones or sticks which they had handed down to them.
The idea, that anything could have existed before these

' Hind, Canadian Bed Biver Expedition, ii., p. 135.
'■'See Ling Roth, Sarawak and British North Borneo, i., p. 75.
ABSURDITY OF WHITE MAN'S IDEAS 243

original ancestors, struck them as ridiculous. The ultimate
explanation of any custom of the tribe was, " Our fathers did
it, and therefore we do it ". To try to go behind tradition
was to challenge its sufficiency, and so to pub forward an
absurd paradox.^ Here we have a mental attitude at once
like and unlike that of our children ; for the latter are con-
servative of tradition and disposed to accept authority, but
at the same time very energetic in pushing back inquiry
into " what came before ".
Intelligence would seem not merely to be stirring, but
to be capable of adroit play when the savage detects the
ridiculous in the white man's ideas of the future of his race.
