made with the intention of blinding the tribe. Herein the great difficulty lies. The class of blackfellow doctors was almost extinct in the tribes of which I had a personal knowledge; and in the tribes which were in their quite wild state there was little or no opportunity of an acquaintance with the medicine-men. In those tribes with which I had friendly relations, the medicine-men were of the second generation, that is, it was their predecessors who had practised their arts in the wild state of the tribe. The real old Gommeras of the Coast Murring became extinct when the before-mentioned "Waddiman" died. The Wirrarap of the Wurunjerri, and the Bangal of the Wotjobaluk, disappeared about the time of the early gold-diggings in Victoria. But I think that the amount of evidence which I have been able to rescue from oblivion will enable a fair estimate to be made of the powers claimed by the medicine-men, and their influence on the tribal life to be judged.
As to the two men Murri-kangaroo and Tankli, the case is somewhat different, and they represent a class which was larger in the tribes formerly. Granting all that can be said as to the intentional fraud of the medicine-men, and admitting that many of them are mere cheats and frauds, there remain some who really have belief in their own powers as well as in those of other men. I feel strongly assured that both the Wiradjuri and the Kurnai man believed that the events which he related were real, and that he had actually experienced them. As to Tankli, it seems that his case was one of nervous exaltation, combined with somnambulism, and that upon the "subjective realities" in that state he built up a structure of deceit in the practice of his curative art. That he also believed in the reality of the dream which caused him to lose his Kiin and his magical powers seems most probable, when one considers that he voluntarily relinquished the practice of an art which brought him great consideration.
The case of Murri-kangaroo seems to point to the practice of some form of hypnotic suggestion among the old class of medicine-men. The youth, at the time of initiation, is in a peculiar and an abnormal mental state. He is fed
