ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evidence for the interaction between Spencer and Roth. Spencer's and Roth's careers followed a remarkably parallel trajectory from 1881, when they both entered Oxford University to take the newly established Darwinian biology course in the University Museum. Apart from Roth's and Spencer's activities in Australia, WL Sclater went to British Guinea on an anthropological expedition, later becoming Director of the South African Museum, Capetown. Roth compiled the fruits of his ethnological gleanings in Queensland in his Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, whose preface is dated September 1897, a period during which Spencer and Gillen were feverishly preparing their Native Tribes of Central Australia. When Roth compiled his Bulletin 5, on superstition, magic and medicine, he sought Spencer's advice, followed by proofs with an urgent request for criticism.
