314 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the holding up the hand to invoke the personal divine shy, the suc- 

 cessor of this primitive gesture remains to this day among the chief 

 acts in the solemn oaths of European nations. 



It could scarcely be shown more clearly with what childlike 

 imagination the savage conceives that a symbolic action, such as 

 touching his head or his spear, will somehow pass into reality. In 

 connection with this group of oaths, we can carry yet a step further 

 the illustration of the way men's minds work in this primitive stage 

 of association of ideas. One of the accounts from New Guinea is 

 that the swearer, holding up an arrow, calls on Heaven to punish him 

 if he lies ; but by turning the arrow the other way the oath can be 

 neutralized. This is magic all over. What one symbol can do, the 

 reverse symbol can undo. True to the laws of primitive magical rea- 

 soning, uncultured men elsewhere still carry on the symbolic reversal 

 of their oaths. An Abyssinian chief, who had sworn an oath he dis- 

 liked, has been seen to scrape it off his tongue and spit it out. There 

 are still places in Germany where the false witness reckons to escape 

 the spiritual consequences of perjury by crooking one finger, to make 

 it, I suppose, not a straight but a crooked oath, or he puts his left 

 hand to his side to neutralize what the right hand is doing. Here is 

 the idea of our " over the left ; " but so far as I know this has come 

 down with us to mere schoolboy's shuffling. 



. It has just been noticed that the arsenal of deadly weapons by 

 which the natives of Aracan swear, includes a tiger's tusk and a 

 crocodile's tooth. This leads us to a group of instructive rites belong- 

 ing to Central and North Asia. Probably to this day there may be 

 seen in Russian law-courts in Siberia the oath on the bear's head. 

 When an Ostiak is to be sworn a bear's head is brought into court, 

 and the man makes believe to bite at it, calling on the bear to de- 

 vour him in like manner if he does not tell the truth. Now, the 

 meaning of this act goes beyond magic and into religion, for we 

 are here in the region of bear-worship, among people who believe 

 that this wise and divine beast knows what goes on, and will come 

 and punish them. Nor need one wonder at this, for the idea that 

 the bear will hear and come if called on is familiar to German my- 

 thology. I was interested to find it still in survival in Switzerland 

 a few years ago, when a peasant-woman, whom a mischievous little 

 English boy had irritated beyond endurance, pronounced the ancient 

 awful imprecation on him, " The bear take thee ! " (der Bar nimm 

 dich 1) Among the hill-tribes of India a tiger's skin is sworn on in 

 the same sense as the bear's head among the Ostiaks. Rivers, again, 

 which to the savage and barbarian are intelligent and personal divini- 

 ties, are sworn by in strong belief that their waters will punish him 

 who takes their name in vain. We can understand why Homeric 

 heroes swore by the rivers, when we hear still among Hindoos how the 

 sacred Ganges will take vengeance sure and terrible on the children 



