Monsieur René Hoffmann's work is his thesis for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in the University of Geneva. His topic is "The All Father," in Mr. Howitt's useful phrase, and the belief in the All Father among savages and barbarians of various grades of culture. In his opinion the facts, till quite recently, have been "little dwelt upon, or ill interpreted" by students of the evolution of religion, though they "place a point of interrogation" on the theories whose authors pass them by.
M. Hoffmann regrets that in French there is no equivalent for our "All Father," and protests that he uses "Être Suprême" with no metaphysical connotation. He wants "a term neutral, colourless, and without history," and such a term in French it is difficult to find.
Beginning with Australia, M. Hoffmann makes good use of all our most recent authorities, including Herr Strehlow's letters in Globus of 1907. I do not know J. Dawson's The English Colony of N.E. Wales, 1804, and suspect a misprint in the date (p. 26). When our author represents Mr. Howitt as "contradicting himself" (p. 30), in 1883-1904, about a Dieri All Father, he seems to misunderstand his authority. The statements of Mr. Gason about an All Father, Mura-Mura, cited in 1883 by Mr. Howitt, were contradicted by Mr. Siebert's discovery that the Mura-Mura are mythical ancestral beings. To be sure Herr Reuther corroborates Mr. Gason as to an All Father, named Mura, distinct from the ancestral Mura-Mura, and Reuther had fourteen years of experience among the Dieri, as a missionary. The tribe is now verging on extinction, but as Mr. Siebert found no All Father, while the sky-dweller faintly remembered is Arawotja, not Mura, Mr. Howitt could only accept the most recent information, in correction of the earlier account.
As against the denial of an Arunta All Father, M. Hoffmann sets the Altjira of Herr Strehlow. Probably he exists in the
