522 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men's shadows as their souls ; and he also says of the Wanika that 

 they are afraid of their own shadows : possibly thinking, as some other 

 negroes do, that their shadows watch all their actions, and bear 

 witness against them. Among the Greenlanders, according to Crantz, 

 a man's shadow is one of his two souls the one which goes away from 

 his body at night. Among the Feejeeans, too, the shadow is called 

 " the dark spirit," as distinguished from another which each man pos- 

 sesses. And the community of meaning, hereafter to be noted more 

 fully, which various unallied languages betray between shade and 

 spirit, shows us the same thing. 



These illustrations of the truth that a shadow is originally re- 

 garded as an appended entity suggest more than I here wish to show. 

 The ideas of the uncivilized, as we now find them, have developed 

 from their first vague forms into forms having more coherence and 

 deiiniteness. We must neglect the special characters of these ideas, 

 and consider only that most general character with which they began. 

 This proves to be the character we inferred above. Shadows are re- 

 alities which, always intangible and often invisible, nevertheless sever- 

 ally belong to their visible and tangible correlatives ; and the facts 

 they present furnish further materials both for the notion of apparent 

 and unapparent states, and for the notion of a duality in things. 



Other phenomena, in some respects allied, yield these notions still 

 more materials. I refer to reflections. 



If the rude resemblance in outlines and movements which a shadow 

 bears to the person casting it raises the idea of a second entity, much 

 more must the exact resemblance of a reflection do this. Repeating 

 all the details of form, of light and shade, of color, and mimicking 

 even the grimaces of the original, this image cannot at first be inter- 

 preted otherwise than as an existence. Only by experiment is it as- 

 certained that to the visual impressions there are not, in this case, 

 those corresponding tactual impressions yielded by most other things. 

 What results ? Simply the notion of an existence which can be seen 

 but not felt. Optical interpretation is impossible. That the image 

 is formed by reflected rays, cannot be conceived while physical knowl- 

 edge does not exist ; and, in the absence of authoritative statement 

 that the reflection is a mere appearance, it is inevitably taken for a 

 reality a reality in some way belonging to the person whose traits it 

 simulates and whose actions it mocks. 



Moreover, these duplicates seen in the water yield to the primi- 

 tive man obvious verifications of certain other beliefs which surround- 

 ing things suggest. Deep down in the clear pool, are there not clouds 

 like those he sees above ? The clouds above appear and disappear. 

 Has not the existence of these clouds below something to do with it ? 

 At night, again, seeming as though far underneath the surface of the 

 water, are stars as bright as those overhead. Are there, then, two 



