Note 46 — Chapter L · GODS AS GUARDIANS OF MORALITY

When the natives of Cooksland, in North-Eastern Australia, rob a wild bees’ hive they generally leave a little of the honey for Buddai, the supernatural ancestor of their race (Lang, Cooksland, p. 460; Idem, Queensland, p. 380). Mrs. Langloh Parker (op. cit. pp. 8, 9, 79, 89) was told that in the Euahlayi tribe prayers are addressed to Byamee at funerals for the souls of the dead, and that at some initiatory rites the oldest medicine-man present addresses a prayer to him asking him to give the people long life as they have kept his law; but they do not profess to pray or to have prayed to Byamee on any other occasions (cf. Manning, loc. cit. p. 164). The natives inhabiting the neighbourhood of Lake Boga in Victoria have to placate Pei-a-mei by dances (Missions-Blatt aus der Brüdergemeine, xvi. 143). Of the South-Eastern Australian Daramulun Mr. Howitt says (op. cit. p. 507 sq.) that, although there is no worship of him, “the dances round the figure of clay and the invocating of his name by the medicine-men certainly might have led up to it.”