GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 491 



dared to cut that timber. A story is told of a party from Upolu 

 who once attempted it, and the consequence was that blood flowed 

 from the tree, and that the sacrilegious strangers all took ill and 

 died." Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a sacred larch tree at 

 Nauders in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever it 

 was cut. In some of these cases, it is true, we do not know that 

 the trees grew on tumuli, but this point is specially noticed about 

 Polydorus's dogwood, and is probably implied in the Samoan case, 

 as I gather from the title given to the spirit as King of Fiji. 



In other instances, however, this doubt does not exist ; we are 

 expressly told it is the souls of the dead which are believed to 

 animate the bleeding or speaking trees. " The Dieyerie tribe of 

 South Australia/' says Mr. Frazer, " regard as very sacred certain 

 trees which are supposed to be their fathers transformed ; hence 

 they will not cut the trees down, and protest against settlers do- 

 ing so." 



Again, we must remember that most early worship is offered 

 directly to the spirits of ancestors in the expectation of definite 

 benefits to be derived from their aid. In New Guinea, for exam- 

 ple, where religion has hardly progressed at all beyond the most 

 primitive stage of direct ancestor worship, Mr. Chalmers tells us 

 " when the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of ba- 

 nanas and sugar cane, and go to the center of the plantation and 

 call over the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding, 

 ' There is your food, your bananas and sugar cane ; let our food 

 grow well and let it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and 

 plentifully you all will be full of shame, and so shall we.' " * 



Abundant other evidence could be forthcoming, were it neces- 

 sary, to show that the ancestral spirits are regarded by the most 

 primitive types of men as causing the earth to bring forth fruit 

 in due season. But I hardly think further formal proof of this 

 proposition necessary. 



But how did the ancestral ghosts acquire in the first instance 

 this peculiar power of causing growth in vegetation ? The expla- 

 nation, it seems to me, though crude and barbaric, is a very sim- 

 ple and natural one. In the first place, in many of the earlier and 

 more native forms of sepulture, the dead are buried under a tumu- 

 lus or barrow. Such tumuli, of course, go back in time to a re- 

 mote antiquity. Now, many circumstances would make vegeta- 

 tion upon the turf of the barrows exceptionally luxuriant. In the 

 first place, the soil there has been largely piled up and labored ; it 

 consists for the most part of an accumulation of deep vegetable 

 mold, gathered together from all the surrounding surface ; and at 

 an age when cultivation was wholly unknown — for tumuli, we 



* Chalmers. Work and Adventure in New Guinea, p. 85. 



