794 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Pascagoula, I am unable to say ; but if Darwin's views are correct, 

 and I have no doubt that they are, then we have a very probable 

 explanation of the mysterious music ; if not, then we are as much 

 in the dark as ever.* 



--*+- 



THE INDWELLING SPIRITS OF MEN. 



By Hon. Major A. B. ELLIS. 



IN the spring of 1889 an officer of the United States Army, who 

 was visiting Nassau, N. P., for the benefit of his health, lent 

 me a pamphlet, a reprint of Dr. Washington Matthews's " The 

 Prayer of a Navajo Shaman," which had originally been pub- 

 lished in the " American Anthropologist " for April, 1888, and at 

 page 19 of that pamphlet I read as follows : 



"The suppliant is supposed, through the" influence of witch- 

 craft, exercised either in this world, or in the lower world when 

 in spirit he was traveling there, to have lost his body, or parts 

 thereof not his visible body, nor yet his soul, his breath of life 

 for both of these he knows himself to be still in possession of, 

 but a sort of spiritual body which he thinks constitutes a part of 

 him the astral body, perhaps, of our theosophic friends. This 

 third element of man belongs not only to his living person, but to 

 things which pertain to it, such as his ejected saliva, his fallen 

 hair, the dust of his feet, etc." 



What struck me in this passage was the curious analogy be- 

 tween the belief thus stated to be held by the Navajos and one 

 which, in the course of my investigation of the religious systems 

 of the negroes of West Africa, I had discovered to be held by the 

 various tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts ; and it is with the 

 object of calling the attention of American anthropologists to this 

 third element in man that I venture to put forward this paper. 



The Navajo believes that there are three entities in man: (1) The 



* [Prof G. Brown Goode, in his " American Fishes," mentions several species to which 

 the name Drum has been given because of their ability to produce sounds. In his account 

 of the Sea Drum he says : " Another historical incident is connected with Pogonias. The 

 legend of Pascagoula and its mysterious music, deemed supernatural by the Indians, is still 

 current. ' It may often be heard there on summer evenings,' says a recent writer. ' The 

 listener being on the beach, or, yet more favorably, in a boat floating on the river, a low, 

 plaintive sound is heard rising and falling like that of an ^Eolian harp, and seeming to 

 issue from the water. The sounds, which are sweet and plaintive, but monotonous, cease 

 as soon as there is any noise or disturbance of the water.' Bienville, the French explorer, 

 heard the music of Pascagoula when he made his voyage in 1699 to the mouths of the 

 Mississippi, and his experiences are recorded in his narrative." Speaking of the Lake 

 Drum, Prof. Goode remarks : " These names, ' Croaker,' ' Drum,' ' Thunder-pumper,' etc., 

 refer to the croaking or grunting noise made by this species in common with most Sciae- 

 noids. This noise is thought to be made in the air-bladder by forcing the air from one 

 compartment to another." Editor.] 



