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PREFACE PSYCHE'S TASK

The dark and the bright side of Superstition: a plea for the accused: four propositions to be proved by the defence 3-5

Superstition has been a prop of Government by inculcating a deep veneration for governors: evidence of this veneration collected from Melanesia, Polynesia, Africa, the Malay region, and America: evidence of similar veneration among Aryan peoples from India to Scotland 6-19

Superstition has been a prop of Private Property by inculcating a deep fear of its violation: evidence of this fear collected from Polynesia, Melanesia, the Malay Archipelago, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America 20-43

Superstition has been a prop of Marriage by inculcating a deep fear of disregarding the traditionary rules of sexual morality: evidence of this fear collected from South-Eastern Asia, the Malay Archipelago, Africa, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Irish: extreme severity with which breaches of the sexual code have been punished in India, Babylon, Palestine, Africa, the East Indies, Australia, America, and Europe: the avoidance of the wife's mother and of a man's own mother, sisters, daughters, and female cousins, based on the fear of incest: the origin of the fear of incest unknown: belief that adultery and fornication inflict physical injury not only on the culprits but on their innocent relations: evidence of the belief collected from Africa, America, Sumatra, and New Britain 44-110

Superstition has been a prop for the Security of Human Life by inculcating a deep fear of the ghosts of the murdered dead: evidence of the fear collected from ancient Greece, modern Africa, America, India, New Guinea, Celebes, the Bismarck Archipelago, and Fiji: deep fear of ghosts in general: evidence collected from America, Africa, India, Burma, the Indian Archipelago, Australia, New Guinea, and China: influence of the fear in restraining men from murder 111-153

Summing up for the defence: by serving as a prop for government, private property, marriage, and human life, Superstition has rendered a great service to humanity: Superstition at the bar: sentence of death 154-156

THE SCOPE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology, or the Science of Man, a new study: Social Anthropology restricted to the rudimentary phases of human society: not concerned with the practical application of its results: all forms of human society either savage or evolved out of savagery: hence Social Anthropology deals primarily with savagery and secondarily with those survivals of savagery in civilization which are commonly known as folklore: importance of the study of savagery for an understanding of the evolution of the human mind: existing savages primitive only in a relative sense by comparison with civilized peoples: in reality the savages of the present day probably stand at a high level of culture compared with their remote predecessors: for example, the present systems of marriage and consanguinity among savages appear to have been preceded by a period, not necessarily primitive, of sexual communism: survivals of savagery in civilization due to the natural and ineradicable inequality of men: mankind ultimately led by an intellectual aristocracy: superstition the creed of the laggards in the march of intellect: the wide prevalence of superstition under the surface of society a standing menace to civilization: the lowest forms of superstition the most tenacious of life: function of the Comparative Method in reconstructing the early history of human thought and institutions: its legitimacy based on the ascertained similarity of the human mind in all races: the need of studying savages only of late years understood: urgent importance of the study in consequence of the rapid disappearance of savagery: the duty of our generation to preserve a record of it for posterity: the duty of the Universities and of the State 157-176

INDEX 177-186

ENDNOTES

PSYCHE'S TASK

We are apt to think of superstition as an unmitigated evil, false in itself and pernicious in its consequences. That it has done much harm in the world, cannot be denied. It has sacrificed countless lives, wasted untold treasures, embroiled nations, severed friends, parted husbands and wives, parents and children, putting swords, and worse than swords between them: it has filled gaols and madhouses with its innocent or deluded victims: it has broken many hearts, embittered the whole of many a life, and not content with persecuting the living it has pursued the dead into the grave and beyond it, gloating over the horrors which its foul imagination has conjured up to appal and torture the survivors. It has done all this and more. Yet the case of superstition, like that of Mr. Pickwick after the revelations of poor Mr. Winkle in the witness-box, can perhaps afford to be placed in a rather better light; and without posing as the Devil's Advocate or appearing before you in a blue flame and sulphureous fumes, I do profess to make out what the charitable might call a plausible plea for a very dubious client. For I propose to prove, or at least make probable, by examples that among certain races and at certain stages of evolution some social institutions which we all, or most of us, believe to be beneficial have partially rested on a basis of superstition. The institutions to which I refer are purely secular or civil. Of religious or ecclesiastical institutions I shall say nothing. It might perhaps be possible to shew that even religion has not wholly escaped the taint or dispensed with the support of superstition; but I prefer for to-night to confine myself to those civil institutions which people commonly imagine to be bottomed on nothing but hard common sense and the nature of things. While the institutions with which I shall deal have all survived into civilized society and can no doubt be defended by solid and weighty arguments, it is practically certain that among savages, and even among peoples who have risen above the level of savagery, these very same institutions have derived much of their strength from beliefs which nowadays we should condemn unreservedly as superstitious and absurd. The institutions in regard to which I shall attempt to prove this are four, namely, government, private property, marriage, and the respect for human life. And what I have to say may be summed up in four propositions as follows:--

Before proceeding to deal with these four propositions separately, I wish to make two remarks, which I beg you will bear in mind. First, in what I have to say I shall confine myself to certain races of men and to certain ages of history, because neither my time nor my knowledge permits me to speak of all races of men and all ages of history. How far the limited conclusions which I shall draw for some races and for some ages are applicable to others must be left to future enquiries to determine. That is my first remark. My second is this. If it can be proved that in certain races and at certain times the institutions in question have been based partly on superstition, it by no means follows that even among these races they have never been based on anything else. On the contrary, as all the institutions which I shall consider have proved themselves stable and permanent, there is a strong presumption that they rest mainly on something much more solid than superstition. No institution founded wholly on superstition, that is on falsehood, can be permanent. If it does not answer to some real human need, if its foundations are not laid broad and deep in the nature of things, it must perish, and the sooner the better. That is my second remark.

With these two cautions I address myself to my first proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for government, especially monarchical government, and has thereby contributed to the establishment and maintenance of civil order.

Similarly Mr. Basil Thomson tells us that "the key to the Melanesian system of government is Ancestor-worship. Just as every act in a Fijian's life was controlled by his fear of Unseen Powers, so was his conception of human authority based upon religion." The dead chief was supposed still to watch jealously over his people and to punish them with dearth, storms, and floods, if they failed to bring their offerings to his tomb and to propitiate his spirit. And the person of his descendant, the living chief, was sacred; it was hedged in by a magic circle of taboo and might not even be touched without incurring the wrath of the Unseen. "The first blow at the power of the chiefs was struck unconsciously by the missionaries. Neither they nor the chiefs themselves realized how closely the government of the Fijians was bound up with their religion. No sooner had a missionary gained a foothold in a chief village than the tabu was doomed, and on the tabu depended half the people's reverence for rank. The tabu died hard, as such institutions should do. The first-fruits were still presented to the chief, but they were no longer carried from him to the temple, since their excuse--as an offering to persuade the ancestors to grant abundant increase--had passed away. No longer supported by the priests, the Sacred Chief fell upon evil days"; for in Fiji, as in other places, the priest and the chief, when they were not one and the same person, had played into each other's hands, both knowing that neither could stand firm without the aid of the other.

In the rest of Polynesia the state of things was similar. For example, the natives of Tonga in like manner believed that if any one fed himself with his own hands after touching the sacred person of a superior chief, he would swell up and die; the sanctity of the chief, like a virulent poison, infected the hands of his inferior, and, being communicated through them to the food, proved fatal to the eater, unless he disinfected himself by touching the chief's feet in a particular way. When a king of Tahiti entered on office he was girded with a sacred girdle of red feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with the gods. Henceforth "every thing in the least degree connected with the king or queen--the cloth they wore, the houses in which they dwelt, the canoes in which they voyaged, the men by whom they were borne when they journeyed by land, became sacred--and even the sounds in the language, composing their names, could no longer be appropriated to ordinary significations. Hence, the original names of most of the objects with which they were familiar, have from time to time undergone considerable alterations. The ground on which they even accidentally trod, became sacred; and the dwelling under which they might enter, must for ever after be vacated by its proprietors, and could be appropriated only to the use of these sacred personages. No individual was allowed to touch the body of the king or queen; and every one who should stand over them, or pass the hand over their heads, would be liable to pay for the sacrilegious act with the forfeiture of his life. It was on account of this supposed sacredness of person that they could never enter any dwellings, excepting those that were specially dedicated to their use, and prohibited to all others; nor might they tread on the ground in any part of the island but their own hereditary districts."

A halo of superstitious veneration also surrounded the Yncas or governing class in ancient Peru. Thus the old historian Garcilasso de la Vega, himself the son of an Ynca princess, tells us that "it does not appear that any Ynca of the blood royal has ever been punished, at least publicly, and the Indians deny that such a thing has ever taken place. They say that the Ynca never committed any fault that required correction; because the teaching of their parents, and the common opinion that they were children of the Sun, born to teach and to do good to the rest of mankind, kept them under such control, that they were rather an example than a scandal to the commonwealth. The Indians also said that the Yncas were free from the temptations which usually lead to crime, such as passion for women, envy and covetousness, or the thirst for vengeance; because if they desired beautiful women, it was lawful for them to have as many as they liked; and any pretty girl they might take a fancy to, not only was never denied to them, but was given up by her father with expressions of extreme thankfulness that an Ynca should have condescended to take her as his servant. The same thing might be said of their property; for, as they never could feel the want of anything, they had no reason to covet the goods of others; while as governors they had command over all the property of the Sun and of the Ynca; and those who were in charge, were bound to give them all that they required, as children of the Sun, and brethren of the Ynca. They likewise had no temptation to kill or wound any one either for revenge, or in passion; for no one ever offended them. On the contrary, they received adoration only second to that offered to the royal person; and if any one, how high soever his rank, had enraged any Ynca, it would have been looked upon as sacrilege, and very severely punished. But it may be affirmed that an Indian was never punished for offending against the person, honour, or property of any Ynca, because no such offence was ever committed, as they held the Yncas to be like gods."

Nor have such superstitions been confined to savages and other peoples of alien race in remote parts of the world. They seem to have been shared by the ancestors of all the Aryan peoples from India to Ireland. Thus in the ancient Indian law-book called the Laws of Manu, we read: "Because a king has been formed of particles of those lords of the gods, he therefore surpasses all created beings in lustre; and, like the sun, he burns eyes and hearts; nor can anybody on earth even gaze on him. Through his power he is Fire and Wind, he Sun and Moon, he the Lord of justice , he Kubera, he Varuna, he great Indra. Even an infant king must not be despised that he is a mortal; for he is a great deity in human form." And in the same law-book the effects of a good king's reign are thus described: "In that where the king avoids taking the property of sinners, men are born in time long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no misshaped is born."

Similarly in Homeric Greece, kings and chiefs were described as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine, and their chariots sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley, the trees to be loaded with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the sea to yield fish. When the crops failed, the Burgundians used to blame their kings and depose them. Similarly the Swedes always ascribed the abundance or scantiness of the harvest to the goodness or badness of their kings, and in time of dearth they have been known to sacrifice them to the gods for the sake of procuring good crops. In ancient Ireland it was also believed that when kings observed the customs of their ancestors the seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit-trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of their produce. A canon ascribed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that attend the reign of a just king "fine weather, calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit." Superstitions of the kind which were thus current among the Celts of Ireland centuries ago appear to have survived among the Celts of Scotland down to Dr. Johnson's time; for when he travelled in Skye it was still held that the return of the chief of the Macleods to Dunvegan, after any considerable absence, produced a plentiful catch of herring; and at a still later time, when the potato crop failed, the clan Macleod desired that a certain fairy banner in the possession of their chief might be unfurled, apparently in the belief that the magical banner had only to be displayed to produce a fine crop of potatoes.

The foregoing evidence, summary as it is, may suffice to prove that many peoples have regarded their rulers, whether chiefs or kings, with superstitious awe as beings of a higher order and endowed with mightier powers than common folk. Imbued with such a profound veneration for their governors and with such an exaggerated conception of their power, they cannot but have yielded them a prompter and more implicit obedience than if they had known them to be men of common mould just like themselves. If that is so, I may claim to have proved my first proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for government, especially monarchical government, and has thereby contributed to the establishment and maintenance of civil order.

I pass now to my second proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for private property, and has thereby contributed to the security of its enjoyment.

In other parts of Polynesia the system of taboo with its attendant advantages and disadvantages, its uses and abuses, was practically the same, and everywhere, as in New Zealand, it tightened for good or evil the ties of private property. This indeed was perhaps the most obvious effect of the institution. In the Marquesas Islands, it is said, taboo was invested with a divine character as the expression of the will of the gods revealed to the priests; as such it set bounds to injurious excesses, prevented depredations, and united the people. Especially it converted the tabooed or privileged classes into landed proprietors; the land belonged to them alone and to their heirs; common folk lived by industry and by fishing. Taboo was the bulwark of the landowners; it was that alone which elevated them by a sort of divine right into a position of affluence and luxury above the vulgar; it was that alone which ensured their safety and protected them from the encroachments of their poor and envious neighbours. "Without doubt," say the writers from whom I borrow these observations, "the first mission of taboo was to establish property, the base of all society."

In Tonga a man guilty of theft or of any other crime was said to have broken the taboo, and as such persons were supposed to be particularly liable to be bitten by sharks, all on whom suspicion fell were compelled to go into water frequented by sharks; if they were bitten or devoured, they were guilty; if they escaped, they were innocent.

Similar modes of enforcing the rights of private property by the aid of superstitious fears have been adopted in many other parts of the world. The subject has been copiously illustrated by Dr. Edward Westermarck in his very learned work on the origin and development of the moral ideas. Here I will cite only a few cases out of many. The Kouis of Laos, on the borders of Siam, protect their plantations against thieves in a very simple way. They place a "shaking tubercule" on the land which is to be guarded; and if any thief should thereafter dare to lay hands on the crop, he is immediately seized by a shaking fit like that of a drenched dog and cannot budge from the spot. They say that a fisherman at Sangkeah employed this charm with the best results. He used always to find his bow-net empty till one day he had the happy thought of protecting it by a "shaking tubercule." It acted like magic. The thief went down as usual into the river and brought up the net full of fish. But hardly had he stepped on the bank when he began to shiver and shake, with the dripping net and its writhing silvery contents glued to his breast. Two days afterwards, the proprietor, making his rounds, discovered the thief on the same spot, shivering and chattering away as hard as ever, but of course the fish in the net were dead and rotten. Among the Kawars, a primitive hill tribe of the Central Provinces in India, "the sword, the gun, the axe, the spear have each a special deity, and in fact in the Bangawan, the tract where the wilder Kawars dwell, it is believed that every article of household furniture is the residence of a spirit, and that if any one steals or injures it without the owner's leave the spirit will bring some misfortune on him in revenge. Theft is said to be unknown among them, partly on this account and partly perhaps because no one has much property worth stealing." In Ceylon, when a person wishes to protect his fruit-trees from thieves, he hangs up certain grotesque figures round the orchard and dedicates it to the devils. After that no native will dare to touch the fruit; even the owner himself will not venture to use it till the charm has been removed by a priest, who naturally receives some of the fruit for his trouble. The Indians of Cumana in South America surrounded their plantations with a single cotton thread, and this was safeguard enough; for it was believed that any trespasser would soon die. The Juris of Brazil adopt the same simple means of stopping gaps in their fences.

The Annamites in the interior of Tonquin believe that the ghosts of young girls who have been buried in a corner of the dwelling act as a vigilant police; if thieves have made their way into the house and are preparing to depart with their booty, they hear the voice of a ghost enumerating the things on which they have laid hands, and in a panic they drop them and take to flight. But if in spite of all an Annamite should chance to be robbed, he can easily recover the stolen property as follows. With a clod of earth taken from the kitchen floor, a pinch of vermilion, the white of an egg, and a little alcohol he makes a ball, which stands for the head of the thief. This he puts in the fire on the hearth, and having lit some incense sticks he pronounces the following incantation: "On such a day of such a month of such a year So-and-so was robbed of various things. The name of the thief is unknown. I pray the guardian-spirit of the kitchen to hold the rascal's head in the fire that it may burn." After that, if the thief does not restore the stolen property, he will be a dead man within a month.

Similarly in Nias, an island to the west of Sumatra, when a thief cannot be found he is cursed, and to give weight to the curse a dog is burned alive. While the animal is expiring in torments, the man who has been robbed expresses his wish that the thief may likewise die in agony; and they say that thieves who have been often cursed do die screaming. Curses are also employed for the same purpose with excellent effect by the Sea Dyaks of Borneo. On this point a missionary bears the following testimony. "With an experience of nearly twenty years in Borneo, during which I came into contact with thousands of the people, I have known of only two instances of theft among the Dyaks. One was a theft of rice. The woman who lost the rice most solemnly and publicly cursed the thief, whoever it might be. The next night the rice was secretly left at her door. The other was a theft of money. In this case, too, the thief was cursed. The greater part of the money was afterwards found returned to the box from which it had been abstracted. Both these incidents show the great dread the Dyak has of a curse. Even an undeserved curse is considered a terrible thing, and, according to Dyak law, to curse a person for no reason at all is a fineable offence.

"A Dyak curse is a terrible thing to listen to. I have only once heard a Dyak curse, and I am sure I do not want to do so again. I was travelling in the Saribas district, and at that time many of the Dyaks there had gone in for coffee-planting; indeed, several of them had started coffee plantations on a small scale. A woman told me that some one had over and over again stolen the ripe coffee-berries from her plantation. Not only were the ripe berries stolen, but the thief had carelessly picked many of the young berries and thrown them on the ground, and many of the branches of the plants had been broken off. In the evening, when I was seated in the public part of the house with many Dyak men and women round me, we happened to talk about coffee-planting. The woman was present, and told us of her experiences, and how her coffee had been stolen by some thief, who, she thought, must be one of the inmates of the house. Then she solemnly cursed the thief. She began in a calm voice, but worked herself up into a frenzy. We all listened horror-struck, and no one interrupted her. She began by saying what had happened, and how these thefts had gone on for some time. She had said nothing before, hoping that the thief would mend his ways; but the matter had gone on long enough, and she was going to curse the thief, as nothing, she felt sure, would make him give up his evil ways. She called on all the spirits of the waters and the hills and the air to listen to her words and to aid her. She began quietly, but became more excited as she went on. She said something of this kind:

"'If the thief be a man, may he be unfortunate in all he undertakes! May he suffer from a disease that does not kill him, but makes him helpless--always in pain--and a burden to others. May his wife be unfaithful to him, and his children become as lazy and dishonest as he is himself. If he go out on the war-path, may he be killed, and his head smoked over the enemy's fire. If he be boating, may his boat be swamped and may he be drowned. If he be out fishing, may an alligator kill him suddenly, and may his relatives never find his body. If he be cutting down a tree in the jungle, may the tree fall on him and crush him to death. May the gods curse his farm so that he may have no crops, and have nothing to eat, and when he begs for food, may he be refused, and die of starvation.

"'If the thief be a woman, may she be childless, or if she happen to be with child let her be disappointed, and let her child be still-born, or, better still, let her die in childbirth. May her husband be untrue to her, and despise her and ill-treat her. May her children all desert her if she live to grow old. May she suffer from such diseases as are peculiar to women, and may her eyesight grow dim as the years go on, and may there be no one to help her or lead her about when she is blind.'

"I have only given the substance of what she said; but I shall never forget the silence and the awed faces of those who heard her. I left the house early next morning, so I do not know what was the result of her curse--whether the thief confessed or not."

The ancient Greeks seem to have made a very liberal use of curses as a cheap and effective mode of protecting property, which dispenses the injured party from resorting to the tedious, expensive, and too often fruitless formalities of the law. These curses they inscribed on tablets of lead and other materials and deposited either in the place which was to be protected from depredation or in the temple of the god to whose tender mercies the criminal was committed. For example, in a sacred precinct dedicated to Demeter, Persephone, Pluto and other deities of a stern and inflexible temper at Cnidus, a number of leaden tablets were found inscribed with curses which consigned the malefactors of various sorts to the vengeance of the two Infernal Goddesses, Demeter and her daughter. "May he or she never find Persephone propitious!" is the constantly repeated burden of these prayers; and in some of them the sinner is not only excommunicated in this world but condemned to eternal torments in the world hereafter. Often the persons who launched these curses were ladies. One irate dame consigns to perdition the thief who had stolen her bracelet or the defaulter who had failed to send back her underclothes. Another curse, engraved on a marble slab found at Smyrna, purports that if any man should steal one of the sacred vessels of a certain goddess or injure her sacred fish, he may die a painful death, devoured by the fishes. Sometimes, apparently, these Greek imprecations were as effective in reclaiming sinners as Dyak curses are to this day. Thus we read of a curious dedication to a lunar deity of Asia Minor, by name Men Aziottenos, which declares how one Artemidorus, having been reviled by a couple of rude fellows, cursed them in a votive tablet, and how one of the culprits, having been punished by the god, made a propitiatory offering and mended his wicked ways. To prevent people from encroaching on their neighbours' land by removing the boundary stones, the Greeks committed landmarks to the special protection of the great god Zeus; and Plato dwells with unction on the double punishment, divine and human, to which the sinner exposed himself who dared to tamper with these sacred stones. The Romans went even further, for they created a god for the sole purpose of looking after landmarks, and he must have had his hands very full if he executed all the curses which were levelled not only at every man who shifted his neighbour's boundary stone, but even at the oxen which he employed to plough up his neighbour's land. The Hebrew code of Deuteronomy pronounced a solemn curse on such as removed their neighbour's landmarks; and Babylonian kings exhausted their imagination in pouring out a flood of imprecations against the abandoned wretch who thus set at naught the rights of property in land. King Nebuchadnezzar in particular, before he was turned out to grass, appears to have distinguished himself by the richness and variety of his execrations, if we may judge by a specimen of them which has survived. A brief extract from this masterpiece may serve to illustrate the king's style of minatory eloquence. Referring to the bold bad man, "be it shepherd or governor, or agent or regent, levy master or magistrate," whosoever he might be, who "for all days to come, for the future of human habitations," should dare to tamper with the land which his Majesty had just marked out, "Ninib, lord of boundaries and boundary-stones, tear out his boundary stone. Gula, great lady, put lingering illness into his body, that dark and light red blood he may pour out like water. Ishtar, lady of countries, whose fury is a flood, reveal difficulties to him, that he escape not from misfortune. Nusku, mighty lord, powerful burner, the god, my creator, be his evil demon and may he burn his root. Whoever removes this stone, in the dust hides it, burns it with fire, casts it into water, shuts it up in an enclosure, causes a fool, a deaf man, an idiot to take it, places it in an invisible place, may the great gods, who upon this stone are mentioned by their names, curse him with an evil curse, tear out his foundation and destroy his seed."

In Africa also superstition is a powerful ally of the rights of private property. Thus the Balonda place beehives on high trees in the forest and protect them against thieves by tying a charm or "piece of medicine" round the tree-trunks. This proves a sufficient protection. "The natives," says Livingstone, "seldom rob each other, for all believe that certain medicines can inflict disease and death; and though they consider that these are only known to a few, they act on the principle that it is best to let them all alone. The gloom of these forests strengthens the superstitious feelings of the people. In other quarters, where they are not subjected to this influence, I have heard the chiefs issue proclamations to the effect, that real witchcraft medicines had been placed at certain gardens from which produce had been stolen; the thieves having risked the power of the ordinary charms previously placed there."

Similar evidence might doubtless be multiplied, but the foregoing cases suffice to shew that among many peoples and in many parts of the world superstitious fear has operated as a powerful motive to deter men from stealing. If that is so, then my second proposition may be regarded as proved, namely, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for private property and has thereby contributed to the security of its enjoyment.

I pass now to my third proposition, which is, that among certain races and at certain times superstition has strengthened the respect for marriage, and has thereby contributed to a stricter observance of the rules of sexual morality both among the married and the unmarried. That this is true will appear, I think, from the following instances.

Among the Karens of Burma "adultery, or fornication, is supposed to have a powerful influence to injure the crops. Hence, if there have been bad crops in a village for a year or two, and the rains fail, the cause is attributed to secret sins of this character, and they say the God of heaven and earth is angry with them on this account; and all the villagers unite in making an offering to appease him." And when a case of adultery or fornication has come to light, "the elders decide that the transgressors must buy a hog, and kill it. Then the woman takes one foot of the hog, and the man takes another, and they scrape out furrows in the ground with each foot, which they fill with the blood of the hog. They next scratch the ground with their hands and pray: 'God of heaven and earth, God of the mountains and hills, I have destroyed the productiveness of the country. Do not be angry with me, do not hate me; but have mercy on me, and compassionate me. Now I repair the mountains, now I heal the hills, and the streams and the lands. May there be no failure of crops, may there be no unsuccessful labours, or unfortunate efforts in my country. Let them be dissipated to the foot of the horizon. Make thy paddy fruitful, thy rice abundant. Make the vegetables to flourish. If we cultivate but little, still grant that we may obtain a little.' After each has prayed thus, they return to the house and say they have repaired the earth." Thus, according to the Karens adultery and fornication are not simply moral offences which concern no one but the culprits and their families: they physically affect the course of nature by blighting the earth and destroying its fertility; hence they are public crimes which threaten the very existence of the whole community by cutting off its food supplies at the root. But the physical injury which these offences do to the soil can be physically repaired by saturating it with pig's blood.

Some of the tribes of Assam similarly trace a connexion between the crops and the behaviour of the human sexes; for they believe that so long as the crops remain ungarnered, the slightest incontinence would ruin all. Again, the inhabitants of the hills near Rajamahal in Bengal imagine that adultery, undetected and unexpiated, causes the inhabitants of the village to be visited by a plague or destroyed by tigers or other ravenous beasts. To prevent these evils an adulteress generally makes a clean breast. Her paramour has then to furnish a hog, and he and she are sprinkled with its blood, which is supposed to wash away their sin and avert the divine wrath. When a village suffers from plague or the ravages of wild beasts, the people religiously believe that the calamity is a punishment for secret immorality, and they resort to a curious form of divination to discover the culprits, in order that the crime may be duly expiated. The Khasis of Assam are divided into a number of clans which are exogamous, that is to say, no man may marry a woman of his own clan. Should a man be found to cohabit with a woman of his own clan, it is treated as incest and is believed to cause great disasters; the people will be struck by lightning or killed by tigers, the women will die in child-bed, and so forth. The guilty couple are taken by their clansmen to a priest and obliged to sacrifice a pig and a goat; after that they are made outcasts, for their offence is inexpiable. The Orang Glai, a savage tribe in the mountains of Annam, similarly suppose that illicit love is punished by tigers, which devour the sinners. If a girl is found with child, her family offers a feast of pigs, fowls, and wine to appease the offended spirits.

The Battas of Sumatra in like manner think that if an unmarried woman is with child, she must be given in marriage at once, even to a man of lower rank; for otherwise the people will be infested with tigers, and the crops in the fields will not be abundant. They also believe that the adultery of married women causes a plague of tigers, crocodiles, or other wild beasts. The crime of incest, in their opinion, would blast the whole harvest, if the wrong were not speedily repaired. Epidemics and other calamities that affect the whole people are almost always traced by them to incest, by which is to be understood any marriage that conflicts with their customs. The natives of Nias, an island to the west of Sumatra, imagine that heavy rains are caused by the tears of a god weeping at the commission of adultery or fornication. The punishment for these crimes is death. The two delinquents, man and woman, are buried in a narrow grave with only their heads projecting above ground; then their throats are stabbed with a spear or cut with a knife, and the grave is filled up. Sometimes, it is said, they are buried alive. However, the judges are not always incorruptible and the injured family not always inaccessible to the allurement of gain; and pecuniary compensation is sometimes accepted as a sufficient salve for wounded honour. But if the wronged man is a chief, the culprits must surely die. As a consequence, perhaps, of this severity, the crimes of adultery and fornication are said to be far less frequent in Nias than in Europe.

When the harvest fails in Southern Celebes, the Macassars and Bugineese regard it as a sure sign that incest has been committed and that the spirits are angry. In the years 1877 and 1878 it happened that the west monsoon did not blow and that the rice crop in consequence came to nothing; moreover many buffaloes died of a murrain. At the same time there was in the gaol at Takalar a prisoner, who had been formerly accused of incest. Some of the people of his district begged the Dutch governor to give the criminal up to them, for according to the general opinion the plagues would never cease till the guilty man had received the punishment he deserved. All the governor's powers of persuasion were needed to induce the petitioners to return quietly to their villages; and when the prisoner, having served his time, was released shortly afterwards, he was, at his own request, given an opportunity of sailing away to another land, as he no longer felt safe in his own country. Even when the incestuous couple has been brought to justice, their blood may not be shed; for the people think that, were the ground to be polluted by the blood of such criminals, the rivers would dry up and the supply of fish would run short, the harvest and the produce of the gardens would miscarry, edible fruits would fail, sickness would be rife among cattle and horses, civil strife would break out, and the country would suffer from other widespread calamities. Hence the punishment of the guilty is such as to avoid the spilling of their blood: usually they are tied up in a sack and thrown into the sea to drown. Yet they get on their journey to eternity the necessary provisions, consisting of a bag of rice, salt, dried fish, coco-nuts, and other things, among which three quids of betel are not forgotten. We can now perhaps understand why the Romans used to sew up a parricide in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape for company, and fling him into the sea. They probably feared to defile the soil of Italy by spilling upon it the blood of such a miscreant. Amongst the Tomori of Central Celebes a person guilty of incest is throttled; no drop of his blood may fall on the ground, for if it did, the rice would never grow again. The union of uncle with niece is regarded by these people as incest, but it can be expiated by an offering. A garment of the man and one of the woman are laid on a copper vessel; the blood of a sacrificed animal, either a goat or a fowl, is allowed to drip on the garments, and then the vessel with its contents is set floating down the river. Among the Tololaki, another tribe of Central Celebes, persons who have defiled themselves with incest are shut up in a basket and drowned. No drop of their blood may be spilt on the ground, for that would hinder the earth from ever bearing fruit again. Among the Bare'e-speaking Toradjas of Central Celebes in general the penalty for incest, that is for the sexual intercourse of parents with children or of brothers with sisters, is death. But whereas the death-sentence for adultery is executed with a spear or a sword, the death-sentence for incest is usually executed among the inland tribes by clubbing or throttling; for were the blood of the culprits to drip on the ground, the earth would be rendered barren. The people on the coast put the guilty pair in a basket, weight it with stones, and fling it into the sea. This prescribed manner of putting the incestuous to death, we are informed, makes the execution very grievous. However, the writers who furnish us with these particulars and who have lived among the people on terms of intimacy for many years, add that "incest seldom occurs, or rather the cases that come to light are very few." In some districts of Central Celebes, the marriage of cousins, provided they are children of two sisters, is forbidden under pain of death; the people think that such an alliance would anger the spirits, and that the rice and maize harvests would fail. Strictly speaking, two such cousins who have committed the offence should be tied together, weighted with stones, and thrown into water to drown. In practice, however, the culprits are spared and their sin expiated by shedding the blood of a buffalo or a goat. The blood is mixed with water and sprinkled on the rice-fields or poured on the maize-fields, no doubt in order to appease the angry spirits and restore its fertility to the tilled land. The natives of these districts believe that were a brother and sister to commit incest, the ground on which the tribe dwells would be swallowed up. If such a crime takes place, the guilty pair are tied together, their feet weighted with stones, and thrown into the sea.

When it rains in torrents, the Galelareese of Halmahera, another large East Indian island, say that brother and sister, or father and daughter, or in short some near kinsfolk are having illicit relations with each other, and that every human being must be informed of it, for then only will the rain cease to descend. The superstition has repeatedly caused blood relations to be accused, rightly or wrongly, of incest. Further, the people think that alarming natural phenomena, such as a violent earthquake or the eruption of a volcano, are caused by crimes of the same sort. Persons charged with such offences are brought to Ternate; it is said that formerly they were often drowned on the way or, on being haled thither, were condemned to be thrown into the volcano. In the Banggai Archipelago, to the east of Celebes, earthquakes are explained as punishments inflicted by evil spirits for indulgence in illicit love.

The Dinkas of the Upper Nile believe that incest angers the ancestral spirits , who punish the girl by making her barren. Even should she marry, she will have no children until she has confessed her sin, and atonement has been made for it. Her lover must provide a bullock for sacrifice. His father kills the animal, and the girl's father takes some of the contents of the large intestine and smears it on his daughter's abdomen and on that of her guilty partner. Thus the taint of sin is removed, and the woman is rendered capable of bearing children. The Maloulekes and Hlengoues, two tribes of Southern Africa to the north of the Thonga, think that if a young man gets a girl, who is not his wife, with child, people will die in the village. Hence, when the girl's pregnancy is discovered, the lover has to provide a girl by way of fine.

So far as we can guess at the meaning of these curious rites, their general intention seems to be to identify the hunter and his family with the game which he hunts in order to give him full power over the animals. This intention is manifested in the behaviour of the hunter's wife while the hippopotamus is wounded; she so far identifies herself with the animal that whatever she does he is supposed to do. If she goes about her work briskly and refreshes herself with food and drink, the hippopotamus also will be brisk and refreshed, and will give warm work to his pursuers; whereas if she keeps perfectly still, the animal will make no resistance but follow the hunters like a sheep to the slaughter. Perhaps the same train of thought partially explains the incest which the hunter has to commit with his own daughter before he sets out for the chase. Can it be that by this violence done to his offspring he is supposed to acquire power over the beast? It may be so, yet it is difficult to see why the violence should take this particular form, and why, on the principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic, a pretence of wounding and killing the girl with a spear would not have served his turn better.

Another tribe of savages who imagine that in certain circumstances incest is the road to fortune are the Antambahoaka of South-Eastern Madagascar. Before setting out for the chase or the fishing or war or other enterprise, every Antambahoaka arranges to have sexual relations with his sister or with his nearest female relation; he thinks in this way to ensure the success of his expedition. What the exact train of thought may be which prompts these exceptional and deliberate aberrations from the usual rules of morality, it is difficult to understand; I mention the facts because they apparently contradict the ordinary savage view of conduct, and so far help us to perceive how little as yet we really know about the inmost workings of the savage mind.

Leaving out of account these remarkable and as yet not fully explained exceptions to the rule, we may say generally that among many savage races breaches of the marriage laws are believed to draw down on the community public calamities of the most serious character, and that in particular they are thought to blast the fruits of the earth through excessive rain or excessive drought. Traces of similar beliefs may perhaps be detected among the civilized races of antiquity. Thus among the Hebrews we read how Job, passionately protesting his innocence before God, declares that he is no adulterer; "For that," says he, "were an heinous crime; yea it were an iniquity to be punished by the judges: for it is a fire that consumeth unto Destruction, and would root out all mine increase." In this passage the Hebrew word translated "increase" commonly means "the produce of the earth"; and if we give the word its usual sense here, then Job affirms adultery to be destructive of the fruits of the ground, which is precisely what many savages still believe. This interpretation of his words is strongly confirmed by two narratives in Genesis, where we read how Sarah, Abraham's wife, was taken by a king into his harem, and how thereafter God visited the king and his household with great plagues, especially by closing up the wombs of the king's wife and his maid-servants so that they bare no children. It was not till the king had discovered and confessed his sin, and Abraham had prayed God to forgive him, that the king's women again became fruitful. These narratives seem to imply that adultery, even when it is committed in ignorance, is a cause of plague and especially of sterility among women. Again, in Leviticus, after a long list of sexual crimes, we read: "Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you: and the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomiteth out her inhabitants." This passage seems to imply that the land itself was somehow physically affected by sexual transgressions in such a way that it could no longer support the inhabitants. Apparently the ancient Greeks entertained a similar view of the wasting effect of incest; for according to Sophocles the land of Thebes suffered from blight, pestilence, and the sterility both of women and cattle under the reign of Oedipus, who had unwittingly slain his father and married his mother; the country was emptied of its inhabitants, and the Delphic oracle declared that the only way to restore prosperity to it was to banish the sinner. No doubt the poet and his hearers set down these public calamities in part to the guilt of parricide which rested on Oedipus; but probably they also laid much of the evil at the door of the incest which he had committed with his mother. In the reign of the emperor Claudius a Roman noble was accused of incest with his sister. He committed suicide, his sister was banished, and the emperor ordered that certain ancient ceremonies derived from the laws of King Servius Tullius should be performed, and that expiation should be made by the pontiffs at the sacred grove of Diana. As Diana appears to have been a goddess of fertility in general and of the fruitfulness of women in particular, the expiation for incest offered at her sanctuary may perhaps be accepted as evidence that the Romans, like other peoples, attributed to sexual immorality a tendency to blast the fruits both of the earth and of the womb.

Thus it appears that in the opinion of many peoples sexual irregularities, whether of the married or the unmarried, are not merely moral offences which affect only the few persons immediately concerned; they are believed to involve the whole people in danger and disaster either directly by a sort of magical influence or indirectly by rousing the wrath of gods to whom these acts are offensive. Nay they are often supposed to strike a blow at the very existence of the community by blighting the fruits of the earth and thereby cutting off the food supply. Wherever these superstitions prevail, it is obvious that public opinion and public justice will treat sexual offences with far greater severity than is meted out to them by peoples who, like most civilized nations, regard such misdemeanours as matters of private rather than of public concern, as sins rather than crimes, which may perhaps affect the eternal welfare of the individual sinner in a life hereafter, but which do not in any way imperil the temporal welfare of the innocent community as a whole. And conversely, wherever we find that incest, adultery, and fornication are treated by the community with extreme rigour, we may reasonably infer that the original motive for such treatment was superstition; in other words, that wherever a tribe or nation, not content with leaving these transgressions to be avenged by the injured parties, has itself punished them with exceptional severity, the reason for doing so has probably been a belief that the effect of all such delinquencies is to disturb the course of nature and thereby to endanger the whole people, who accordingly must protect themselves by effectually disarming and, if necessary, exterminating the delinquents. This may explain, for example, why the Indian Laws of Manu decreed that an adulteress should be devoured by dogs in a public place, and that an adulterer should be roasted to death on a red-hot iron bed; why the Babylonian code of Hammurabi sentenced an adulterous couple to be strangled and cast into the river; and why the same code punished incest with a mother by burning both the culprits. On the same supposition we can understand the severity of the punishments meted out to certain sexual offences by the Mosaic law. Thus, for example, under it an adulteress and her paramour were sentenced to death: a woman who at marriage was found not to be a maid was stoned: the unchaste daughter of a priest was burned with fire; and if a man married a woman and her daughter, he and they were in like manner doomed to the flames.

We have seen that in the East Indies sexual crimes, particularly incest, adultery, and fornication, are often viewed with grave displeasure because they are believed to draw down the wrath of the higher powers on the whole community. Hence it is natural that such offences should be treated as high treason and the offenders punished with death. A common punishment is drowning. For example, when incest between a parent and a child or between a brother and a sister has been detected among the Kubus, a primitive aboriginal tribe of Sumatra, the culprits are enclosed in a large fish-trap, made of rattan or bamboo, and sunk in a deep pool of the river. However, they are not pinioned; nay, they are even furnished with a tin knife, and if they can cut their way out of the trap, rise through the bubbling water to the surface, and swim ashore, they are allowed to live. In the island of Bali incest and adultery are punished by drowning; the criminals are sewed up in a sack half-filled with stones and rice and cast into the sea. A like doom is incurred by a woman who marries a man of a lower caste; but sometimes she dies a more dreadful death, being burnt alive. Both modes of execution may be adopted in order to avoid shedding the blood of the sinners; for in Bali, the ordinary way of despatching a criminal is to stab him to the heart with a creese or crooked Malay sword. In the island of Celebes, as we saw, the blood of persons who have been guilty of certain sexual crimes is believed to blast the ground on which it falls; so that it is natural in their case to resort to a bloodless mode of execution such as drowning or burning. In Mamoedjoe, a district on the west coast of Celebes, the incest of a father with his daughter or of a brother with his sister is punished by binding the culprits hand and foot, weighting them with stones, and flinging them into the sea. Among the Bugineese of Southern Celebes persons of princely rank who have committed this crime are placed on a raft of bamboos and set floating away out to sea. In Semendo, a district of Sumatra, the punishment for incest and murder used to be to bury the criminals alive. Before they were led to their doom, it was customary for the villagers to feast them, every family killing a fowl for the purpose. Then the whole population escorted the culprits to their grave outside the village and saw the earth shovelled in upon them. In the year 1864, at the village of Tandjong Imam, this doom was executed on a man and his deceased wife's sister, with whom he had been detected in an intrigue. "Great was my emotion and indignation," said the humane Dutch governor, "when I stood by the grave of these poor wretches along with the unworthy chiefs who had sat on the bench of justice during the enforced absence of Pangeran Anom and pronounced this sentence. I told them in plain language that judges who pronounced such a sentence of death on grounds so trivial deserved themselves to undergo the same punishment." The Dutch Government has since issued stringent orders that no one henceforth is to be buried alive, and has threatened with death any person who shall dare to disregard its orders. The same punishment for incest is, or used to be, inflicted by the Pasemhers, another tribe of Sumatra, but more merciful than the people of Semendo they gave the culprits at least a chance for their life. The guilty pair were bound back to back and buried in a deep hole, but from the mouth of each a hollow bamboo communicated with the upper air; and if when the grave was opened after seven days the wretches were found to have survived a prolonged agony far worse than death, they were granted their life. Nor was even this dreadful fate the worst that could befall the sinner who broke the rules of sexual morality in Sumatra. The Battas or Bataks of Central Sumatra condemned an adulterer to be killed and eaten; strictly speaking he should be speared to death first and eaten afterwards, but as the injured husband and his friends were commonly the judges and executioners, it sometimes happened that, passion proving too strong for a strict adherence to the letter of the law, they cut the flesh from his living body, ate it, and drank his blood, before it occurred to them to terminate his sufferings by a spear-thrust. However, an adulterer occasionally escaped with his life on the payment of a fine, always provided that his accomplice was not the wife of a chief; for in that case there was no help for it but he must be killed and eaten.

Even trivial misdemeanours or acts which we should deem perfectly innocent may draw condign punishment on the thoughtless, the imprudent, the light-hearted in the Indian Archipelago. Thus we read that in the island of Lombok "the men are exceedingly jealous and very strict with their wives. A married woman may not accept a cigar or a sirih leaf from a stranger under pain of death. I was informed that some years ago one of the English traders had a Balinese woman of good family living with him--the connexion being considered quite honourable by the natives. During some festival this girl offended against the law by accepting a flower or some such trifle from another man. This was reported to the Rajah , and he immediately sent to the Englishman's house ordering him to give the woman up as she must be 'krissed.' In vain he begged and prayed, and offered to pay any fine the Rajah might impose, and finally refused to give her up unless he was forced to do so. This the Rajah did not wish to resort to, as he no doubt thought he was acting as much for the Englishman's honour as for his own; so he appeared to let the matter drop. But some time afterwards he sent one of his followers to the house, who beckoned the girl to the door, and then saying, 'The Rajah sends you this,' stabbed her to the heart. More serious infidelity is punished still more cruelly, the woman and her paramour being tied back to back and thrown into the sea, where some large crocodiles are always on the watch to devour the bodies. One such execution took place while I was at Ampanam, but I took a long walk into the country to be out of the way till it was all over."

As the Malay peoples of the Indian Archipelago, from whom the foregoing examples are drawn, have reached a fair level of culture, it might perhaps be thought that the extreme severity with which they visit offences against their code of sexual morality springs from an excessive refinement of feeling rather than from a crude superstition; and no doubt it may well happen that extreme sensitiveness on the point of honour, of which the Malays are susceptible, contributes in many cases to sharpen the sword of justice and add fresh force to the stroke. Yet under this delicacy of sentiment there appears to lie a deep foundation of superstition, as we may see by the extraordinary and disastrous influence which in the opinion of these people sexual crime exerts, not so much on the criminals themselves, as on the whole realm of nature, drawing down deluges of rain from the clouds till the crops rot in the fields, shaking the solid earth beneath men's feet, and blowing up into flames the slumbering fires of the volcano, till the sky is darkened at noon by a black canopy of falling ashes and illumined at night by the sullen glow of the molten lava shot forth from the subterranean furnace. And however much an over-refinement of feeling may be invoked to explain the more than Puritanical severity of the Malay moral code in sexual matters, no such explanation can be applied to the like emotion of horror which similar offences excite among the savage aborigines of Australia, the lowest and the least refined probably of all the races of men about whom we possess accurate information. These rude savages also treated with rigorous severity all breaches of that widely ramified network of prohibitions in which throughout the Australian continent, before it fell under English rule, the two sexes lived immeshed. The whole community of a tribe or nation was commonly subdivided into a number of minute bodies, which we are accustomed to call classes or clans according to the principle on which they were variously constituted. No man might marry a woman of his own class or clan, and in most tribes his freedom of choice was still further limited by complex rules of marriage and descent which excluded him from seeking a wife in many more subdivisions of the tribe, and sometimes compelled him to look for her only in one out of them all. And the ordinary penalty for any violation of these rules was death. The offender was lucky who escaped with his life and a body more or less riddled with spear wounds. Thus one who knew the aborigines of Victoria well in the old days, before they were first contaminated and then destroyed by contact with European civilization, tells us that "no marriage or betrothal is permitted without the approval of the chiefs of each party, who first ascertain that no 'flesh' relationship exists, and even then their permission must be rewarded by presents. So strictly are the laws of marriage carried out, that, should any signs of affection and courtship be observed between those of 'one flesh,' the brothers, or male relatives of the woman beat her severely; the man is brought before the chief, and accused of an intention to fall into the same flesh, and is severely reprimanded by the tribe. If he persists, and runs away with the object of his affections, they beat and 'cut his head all over'; and if the woman was a consenting party she is half killed. If she dies in consequence of her punishment, her death is avenged by the man's receiving an additional beating from her relatives. No other vengeance is taken, as her punishment is legal. A child born under such conditions is taken from the parents, and handed over to the care of its grandmother, who is compelled to rear it, as no one else will adopt it. It says much for the morality of the aborigines and their laws that illegitimacy is rare, and is looked upon with such abhorrence that the mother is always severely beaten by her relatives, and sometimes put to death and burned. Her child is occasionally killed and burned with her. The father of the child is also punished with the greatest severity, and occasionally killed. Should he survive the chastisement inflicted upon him, he is always shunned by the woman's relatives, and any efforts to conciliate them with gifts are spurned, and his presents are put in the fire and burned. Since the advent of the Europeans among them, the aborigines have occasionally disregarded their admirable marriage laws, and to this disregard they attribute the greater weakness and unhealthiness of their children."

Again, in the Wakelbura tribe of eastern Queensland the law was extremely strict as to unlawful connexions or elopements between persons too nearly related to each other. Such persons might be, for example, those whom we call cousins both on the father's and the mother's side, as well as those who belonged to a forbidden class. If such a man carried off a woman who had been betrothed to another, he would be pursued not only by the male relations of the woman and of her betrothed husband, but also by the men of his own tribal subdivision, whom he had outraged by his breach of the marriage law; and wherever they overtook him, he would have to fight them all. His own brothers would challenge him to fight by throwing boomerangs or other weapons at him; and if he did not accept the challenge, they would turn on the woman and cripple or kill her with their weapons, unless she could escape into the bush. Nay, the woman's own mother would cut and perhaps slay her with her own hands. Sooner or later the ravisher had to engage in single combat with the man he had injured. Both were fully armed with shield, spear, boomerang and knife. When they had exhausted their missiles, they closed on each other with their knives, a dense ring of blacks generally forming round the combatants to see fair play. In such a fight the man who had broken the tribal law always came off worst; for even if he got the better of his adversary, the other men and even his own brothers would attack him and probably gash him with their knives. Fatal stabs were sometimes given in these fights, but more usually, it would seem, the onlookers interfered and wrested the weapons from the two combatants before they proceeded to extremities. In any case the woman who had eloped was terribly mauled with knives, and if she survived the ordeal was restored to the man whom she had deserted.

Among the tribes in the central parts of North-West Queensland, if a man eloped with a single woman whom he might lawfully marry, but who for any reason was forbidden to him by the tribal council, he had on returning to camp with his wife to run the gauntlet of the outraged community, who hacked his buttocks and shoulders with knives, beat his head and limbs with sticks and boomerangs, and pricked the fleshy parts of his thighs with spears, taking care, however, not to inflict fatal injuries, lest they should incur blood revenge. But if the woman with whom the man had eloped was of a class into which he might not marry, both the culprits were put to death, the relations on both sides tacitly consenting to the execution. In the Yuin tribe of New South Wales, if a man eloped with a woman of his own tribal subdivision, all the men would pursue him; and if he refused to give the woman up, the sorcerer of the place would probably say to his men, "This man has done very wrong, you must kill him"; whereupon somebody would thrust a spear into him, his relatives not interfering lest the same fate should befall them. The same punishment was inflicted for the same offence by the Wotjobaluk tribe of North-Western Victoria; but their western neighbours, the Mukjarawaint tribe, not content with killing the guilty man, cut off the flesh off his thighs and upper arms, roasted and ate it, his own brother partaking of the cannibal meal. As for the rest of the body, they chopped it up small and left it lying on a log. The same custom is said to have been observed by the Jupagalk tribe. Among many tribes of Western Australia, as well as of other parts of that continent, persons who bear the same class-name may not marry. Any such marriage is regarded as incest and rigorously punished. For example, "the union of Boorong and Boorong is to the natives the union of brother and sister, although there may be no real blood relationship between the pair, and a union of that kind is looked upon with horror, and the perpetrators very severely punished and separated, and if the crime is repeated they are both killed." On the other side of the continent the Kamilaroi of New South Wales similarly inflicted condign punishment on both the culprits who persisted in marrying each other contrary to the tribal law; the male relations of the man killed him, and the female relations of the woman killed her. The Kamilaroi of the Gwydir River went further; they killed any man who so much as spoke to or held any communication with his mother-in-law, for one of the most stringent laws of savage etiquette is that which prohibits any direct social intercourse between a man and his wife's mother. The law has been variously explained, but a large body of evidence points to the conclusion that this custom of mutual avoidance is simply a precaution to prevent improper relations between the two. Hence a brief consideration of it is appropriate in this place; for to all appearance the custom, though it may be wholesome and beneficial in practice, has originated purely in superstition. But before giving my reasons for thinking so it may be well, for the sake of those who are unfamiliar with savage etiquette, to illustrate the practice itself by a few examples.

From this statement it appears that a man and his wife's mother are not the only persons who are bound to avoid each other in society; the same rule of social avoidance is incumbent on a man and his son's wife, and on many other persons of opposite sex who are connected with each other by marriage; and in regard to all such persons it is held that any intimate relationship between them would be incestuous. Hence we see, what is important to bear in mind, that the rule of social avoidance incumbent on a man and his wife's mother is by no means solitary of its kind, and cannot be considered apart from a large number of similar rules of avoidance observed between other persons. The same large extension of the rule appears in the customs of the Batamba, a Bantu tribe of Busoga, a country on the north side of the Lake Victoria Nyanza. A Catholic missionary, who has laboured among the Batamba for nine years, describes their practice in this matter as follows:--

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