thought due to a whole personal spirit embodied in or attached to it, or to some less definable influence exerted through it. In some cases this point is made clear, but in many it remains doubtful.

It will help us to a clearer conception of the nature of a fetish, to glance at a curious group of notions which connect a disease at once with spiritual influence, and with the presence of some material object. They are a set of illustrations of the savage principle, that a disease or an actual disease-spirit may exist embodied in a stick or stone or such like material object. Among the natives of Australia, we hear of the sorcerers extracting from their own bodies by passes and manipulations a magical essence called "boylya," which they can make to enter the patient's body like pieces of quartz, which causes pain there and consumes the flesh, and may be magically extracted either as invisible or in the form of a bit of quartz. Even the spirit of the waters, "nguk-wonga," which had caused an attack of erysipelas in a boy's leg (he had been bathing too long when heated) is declared to have been extracted by the conjurors from the affected part in the shape of a sharp stone.1 The Caribs, who very distinctly referred diseases to the action of hostile demons or deities, had a similar sorcerer's process of extracting thorns or splinters from the affected part as the peccant causes, and it is said that in the Antilles morsels of stone and bone so extracted were wrapped up in cotton by the women, as protective fetishes in childbirth. The Malagasy, considering all diseases as inflicted by an evil spirit, consult a diviner, whose method is often to remove the disease by means of a 'faditra ;' this is some object, such as a little grass, ashes, a sheep, a pumpkin, the water the patient has rinsed his mouth with, or what not, and when the priest has counted on it the evils

66

1 Grey, Australia,' vol. ii. p. 337; Eyre, Australia,' vol. ii. p. 362; Oldfield in Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 235, etc.; G. F. Moore, 'Vocab. of S. W. Austr.' pp. 18, 98, 103. See Bonwick, 'Tasmanians,' p. 195.

2 Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' pp. 419, 508; J. G. Müller, pp. 173, 207, 217.

that may injure the patient, and charged the faditra to take them away for ever, it is thrown away, and the malady with it. Among those strong believers in disease-spirits, the Dayaks of Borneo, the priest, waving and jingling charms over the affected part of the patient, pretends to extract stones, splinters, and bits of rag, which he declares are spirits; of such evil spirits he will occasionally bring halfa-dozen out of a man's stomach, and as he is paid a fee of six gallons of rice for each, he is probably disposed (like a chiropodist under similar circumstances) to extract a good many." The most instructive accounts of this kind are those which reach us from Africa. Dr. Callaway has taken down at length a Zulu account of the method of stopping out disease caused by spirits of the dead. If a widow is troubled by her late husband's ghost coming and talking to her night after night as though still alive, till her health is affected and she begins to waste away, they find a "nyanga" or sorcerer who can bar out the disease. He bids her not lose the spittle collected in her mouth while she is dreaming, and gives her medicine to chew when she wakes. Then he goes with her to lay the "itongo," or ghost; perhaps. he shuts it up in a bulb of the inkomfe plant, making a hole in the side of this, putting in the medicine and the dream-spittle, closing the hole with a stopper, and replanting the bulb. Leaving the place, he charges her not to look back till she gets home. Thus the dream is barred; it may still come occasionally, but no longer infests the woman; the doctor prevails over the dead man as regards that dream. In other cases the cure of a sick man attacked by the ancestral spirits may be effected with some of his blood put into a hole in an anthill by the doctor, who closes the hole with a stone, and departs without looking back; or the patient may be scarified over the painful place, and the blood put into the mouth of a frog, caught for the purpose and carried back. So the disease is barred out from the

Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. pp. 221, 232, 422.

2 St. Jolin, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 211, see 72.

man.1 In West Africa, a case in point is the practice of transferring a sick man's ailment to a live fowl, which is set free with it, and if any one catches the fowl, the disease goes to him.2 Captain Burton's account from Central Africa is as follows. Disease being possession by a spirit or ghost, the "mganga mganga" or sorcerer has to expel it, the principal remedies being drumming, dancing, and drinking, till at last the spirit is enticed from the body of the patient into some inanimate article, technically called a "keti" or stool for it. This may be an ornament, such as a peculiar bead or a leopard's claw, or it may be a nail or rag, which by being driven into or hung to a "devil's tree" has the effect of laying the disease-spirit. Or disease-spirits may be extracted by chants, one departing at the end of each stave, when a little painted stick made for it is flung on the ground, and some patients may have as many as a dozen ghosts extracted, for here also the fee is so much apiece.3 In Siam, the Laos sorcerer can send his "phi phob or demon into a victim's body, where it turns into a fleshy or leathery lump, and causes disease ending in death. Thus, on the one hand, the spirit-theory of disease is brought into connexion with that sorcerer's practice so extraordinarily prevalent among the lower races, of pretending to extract objects from the patient's body, such as stones, bones, balls of hair, &c., which are declared to be causes of disease conveyed by magical means into him; of this proceeding I have given some account elsewhere, under the name of the "sucking-cure."5 On the other hand, we see among the lower races that well known conception of a disease or evil influence as an individual being, which may be not merely conveyed by an infected object (though this of course may have much to do with the idea), but may be

Callaway, 'Religion of Amazulu,' p. 314.

2 Steinhauser, 1. c. p. 141. See also Steere, 'East Afr. Tribes,' in 'Journ. Anthrop. Soc.' vol. i. p. cxlviii.

3 Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 352. See 'Sindh,' p. 177.

4 Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 275.

5 Early Hist. of Mankind,' ch. x. See Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 116, etc.

removed by actual transfer from the patient into some other animal or object. Thus Pliny informs us how pains in the stomach may be cured by transmitting the ailment from the patient's body into a puppy or duck, which will probably die of it; it is considered baneful to a Hindu woman to be a man's third wife, wherefore the precaution is taken of first betrothing him to a tree, which dies in her stead;2 after the birth of a Chinese baby, its father's trousers are hung in the room wrong side up, that all evil influences may enter into them instead of into the child.3 Modern folklore still cherishes such ideas. The ethnographer may still study in the "white witchcraft" of European peasants the arts of curing a man's fever or headache by transferring it to a crawfish or a bird, or of getting rid of ague or gout or warts by giving them to a willow, elder, fir, or ash-tree, with suitable charms, "Goe morgen, olde, ick geef oe de Kolde," "Goden Abend, Herr Fleder, hier bring ick mien Feber, ick bind em di an und gah davan," "Ash-tree, ashen tree, pray buy this wart of me," and so forth; or of nailing or plugging an ailment into a tree-trunk, or conveying it away by some of the patient's hair or nail-parings or some such thing, and so burying it. Looking at these proceedings from a moral point of view, the practice of transferring the ailment to a knot or a lock of hair and burying it is the most harmless, but another device is a very pattern of wicked selfishness. In England, warts may be touched each with a pebble, and the pebbles in a bag left on the road to church, to give up their ailments to the unlucky finder; in Germany, a plaister from a sore may be left at a cross-way to transfer the disease to a passer-by; I am told on medical authority that the bunches of flowers which children offer to travellers in Southern Europe are sometimes intended for the ungracious purpose of sending some disease away from their homes. One case of this 1 Plin. xxx. 14, 20. Cardan, 'De Var. Rerum,' cap. xliii.

2 Ward, Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 134, vol. ii. p. 247.

* Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 122.

* Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 1118-23; Wuttke, Volksaberglaube,' pp. 155-70

group, mentioned to me by Mr. Spottiswoode, is particularly interesting. In Thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan-berries, a rag, or any small article, touched by a sick person and then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick person from the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Burton's suggestion that the rags, locks of hair, and what not, hung on trees near sacred places by the superstitious from Mexico to India and from Ethiopia to Ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles of disease; the African "devil's trees" and the sacred trees of Sindh, hung with rags through which votaries have transferred their complaints, being typical cases of a practice surviving in lands of higher culture.

The spirits which enter or otherwise attach themselves to objects may be human souls. Indeed one of the most natural cases of the fetish-theory is when a soul inhabits or haunts the relics of its former body. It is plain enough that by a simple association of ideas the dead person is imagined to keep up a connexion with his remains. Thus we read of the Mandan women going year after year to take food to the skulls of their dead kinsfolk, and sitting by the hour to chat and jest in their most endearing strain with the relics of a husband or child; thus the Guinea negroes, who keep the bones of parents in chests, will go to talk with them in the little huts which serve for their tombs.2 And thus, from the savage who keeps and carries with his household property the cleaned bones of his forefathers, to

Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. ii. p. 375, vol. iii. p. 286; Halliwell, 'Pop. Rhymes,' p. 208; R. Hunt, Pop. Romances,' 2nd Series, p. 211; Hylten-Cavallius, Wärend och Wirdarne,' vol. i. p. 173. It is said, however, that rag, fastened on trees by Gypsies, which passers-by avoid with horror as having diseases thus banned into them, are only signs left for the information of fellow vagrants; Liebich, Die Zigeuner,' p. 96.

Catlin, N. A. Indians,' vol. i. p. 90.

2 J. L. Wilson, W Africa, p. 394.

3 Meiners, Gesch. der Rel.' vol. i. p. 305; J. G. Maller, p. 209.