660 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of it. We must remember in this connection that primitive men 

 really believe- in the world and the life beyond the grave. To them 

 it is all very ordinary reality. Thus, slaves are sacrificed on the 

 tombs of their masters to bear them company in their ghostly life. 

 "The practice of sending messengers to the world beyond the 

 grave," says Mr. Macdonald, " is found on the west coast. A chief 

 summons a slave, delivers to him a message, and then cuts off his 

 head. If the chief forgets anything that he wanted to say, he 

 sends another slave as a postscript." Nor are all the victims 

 unwilling sufferers. Wives perform suttee of their own accord 

 on the pyres of their husbands; young men offered themselves 

 voluntarily for the fatherland to Baal ; Marcus Curtius devoted 

 himself by leaping into the gulf in the forum. 



A curious analogy elsewhere will make this point, I hope, both 

 clearer and more certain. It is a practice with early or undeveloped 

 races to supply an artificial guardian god or spirit for a building, 

 in precisely the same way as I suppose the guardian god or spirit 

 for the growing crops to have been supplied by agriculturists — 

 namely, by killing a human victim, whose blood was sometimes 

 actually used as cement for the walls, so that his ghost might, as 

 it were, be implicitly bound up in the very stones and fabric of the 

 building. There is a legend current in Scotland, says Mr. Tylor,* 

 that the Picts bathed their foundation stones with human blood ; 

 and St. Columba, not much more advanced in thought than his 

 heathen contemporaries, "found it necessary to bury St. Oran 

 alive beneath the foundation of his monastery." As the chron- 

 icler phrases it, " Columbkille said to his people, ' It would be well 

 for us that our roots should pass into the earth here.' And he 

 said to them, 'It is permitted to you that some one of you go 

 under the earth to consecrate it.'" Oran accepted the sacrifice. f 

 Even in modern Europe such usages survived late. When the 

 broken dam of the Nogat had to be repaired in 1463, the peasants, 

 being advised to throw in a living man, are said to have made a 

 beggar drunk and utilized him for the purpose. Thuringian legend 

 declares that to make the castle of Liebenstein fast and impreg- 

 nable, a child was bought for hard money of its mother and walled 

 in. Notice here the analogy to Kandh custom with the meriahs. 

 The child was eating a cake while the masons were at work and 

 it cried out, " Mother, I see thee still " ; then after a little time, 

 " Mother, I see thee a little still " ; finally, as they put in the last 

 stone, "Mother, now I see thee no more." The wall of Copen- 

 hagen, says Mr. Tylor, to whom I am indebted for most of these 

 cases, sank as fast as it was built ; so they took an innocent little 

 girl, and set her at a table with toys and eatables ; then, while she 



* Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 104. \ Reeves's Life of St. Columba, p. 288. 



