lived with them for eleven years, and presided over our benevolent efforts ‘to reclaim them from their savage state,’ the Andamanese turn out to be quite embarrassingly rich in the higher elements of faith.  They have not only a profoundly philosophical religion, but an excessively absurd mythology, like the Australian blacks, the Greeks, and other peoples.  If, on the whole, the student of the Andamanese despairs of the possibility of an ethnological theory of religion, he is hardly to be blamed.

The people are probably Negritos, and probably ’the original inhabitants, whose occupation dates from prehistoric times.’[4] They use the bow, they make pots, and are considerably above the Australian level.  They have second-sighted men, who obtain status ’by relating an extraordinary dream, the details of which are declared to have been borne out subsequently by some unforeseen event, as, for instance, a sudden death or accident.’  They have to produce fresh evidential dreams from time to time.  They see phantasms of the dead, and coincidental hallucinations.[5] All this is as we should expect it to be.

Their religion is probably not due to missionaries, as they always shot all foreigners, and have no traditions of the presence of aliens on the islands before our recent arrival.[6] Their God, Puluga, is ‘like fire,’ but invisible.  He was never born, and is immortal.  By him were all things created, except the powers of evil.  He knows even the thoughts of the heart.  He is angered by yubda = sin, or wrong-doing, that is falsehood, theft, grave assault, murder, adultery, bad carving of meat, and (as a crime of witchcraft) by burning wax.[7] ’To those in pain or distress he is pitiful, and sometimes deigns to afford relief.’  He is Judge of Souls, and the dread of future punishment ’to some extent is said to affect their course of action in the present life.’[8]

This Being could not be evolved out of the ordinary ghost of a second-sighted man, for I do not find that ancestral ghosts are worshipped, nor is there a trace of early missionary influence, while Mr. Man consulted elderly and, in native religion, well-instructed Andamanese for his facts.

Yet Puluga lives in a large stone house (clearly derived from ours at Port Blair), eats and drinks, foraging for himself, and is married to a green shrimp.[9] There is the usual story of a Deluge caused by the moral wrath of Puluga.  The whole theology was scrupulously collected from natives unacquainted with other races.

The account of Andamanese religion does not tally with the anthropological hypothesis.  Foreign influence seems to be more than usually excluded by insular conditions and the jealousy of the ‘original inhabitants.’  The evidence ought to make us reflect on the extreme obscurity of the whole problem.