GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 661 



played and ate, twelve master masons closed a vault over her ; and 

 with, clanging music the wall was raised, and stood firm ever after- 

 ward. In Italy, again, the bridge of Arta fell in time after time 

 till they walled in the master builder's wife, the last point being a 

 significant detail, which brings us very near to the sacrificial sav- 

 age pattern. At Scutari, in Servia, once more, the fortress could 

 only be satisfactorily built after a human victim was walled into 

 it ; so the three brothers who wrought at it decided to offer up the 

 first of their wives who came to the place to bring them food. 

 And so, too, in Welsh legend, Vortigern could not finish his tower 

 till the foundation stone was wetted with the blood of a child born 

 of a mother without a father — a common trait in the generation of 

 man-gods. 



In Polynesia, where we always stand nearer to the roots and 

 beginning of things, Ellis heard that the central pillar of one of 

 the temples at Maeva was planted upon the body of a human vic- 

 tim. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, a slave girl was crushed to 

 death under the first post of a house. Even in Japan, a couple 

 of centuries since, when a great wall was to be built, "some 

 wretched slave would offer himself as a foundation." Observe 

 here, too, the further important fact that the immolation in this 

 case was apparently quite voluntary. Mr. Tylor, indeed, treats 

 all these instances as though the victim were offered up to appease 

 the earth-demons ; but one of his own authorities, Mason, was told 

 by an eye-witness that, at the building of the new city of Tavoy 

 in Tennasserim, " a criminal was put in each post-hole to become 

 a protecting demon." Here we have, I think, the more probable 

 explanation, an explanation which exactly accords in every point 

 with the principles and practice of the Kandhs and the other 

 human-sacrificing savages. 



In October, 1881, the king of Ashanti put fifty girls to death, 

 that their blood might be mixed with the mud used to repair the 

 royal palace, injured by an earthquake. "Some years ago, the 

 piers of a railway bridge under construction in central India were 

 twice washed away, when nearly finished, by the floods, and a 

 rumor spread abroad among the Bheels of the neighboring jungles 

 that one of them was to be seized and sacrificed by the engineers, 

 who had received such manifest proof of mysterious opposition 

 to their work." * Schrader says that when the great railway bridge 

 over the Ganges was begun, every mother in India trembled for 

 her child, f Mr. Baring-Gould has contributed a striking article 

 on this subject to Murray's Magazine for March, 1887 ; and he 

 differs from Mr. Tylor in attributing the practice of immolation 

 (rightly, as I believe) to the desire to produce a protecting spirit 



* Sir A. Lyall, Asiatic Studies, p. 19. f Clodd, Childhood of Religion, p. 268. 



