S.A. NATIVES AND PRIMITIVE FOLK CUSTOM. 4OQ 



a child has been born within, and that the motlier is therefor 

 taboo to certain people. ) How like all this is to the Lapp and 

 the Norseman with his flint, steel and tinder in the former 

 case for the long- Arctic nij^ht of death, and the horse and 

 armour,* perhaps the very ship, in the barrow of the latter. 

 See the skeletons lying" in the Mainz Museum as found with 

 their crocks and gear around them, and then read the extra- 

 ordinary survivals mentioned in Sebillot's Paganisme 'Con- 

 temporain, the cakes and bottles of wine for the refection of 

 the corpse in Brittany, and, suitably enough, at Bordeaux, 

 buried not so long ago, and beer correspondingly in England; 

 pipe and tobacco in the case of a French soldier; even lost teeth 

 in Cornwall for use beyond the grave ; a cotton umbrella in 

 France for the voyage of the cofilin on the subterranean sea of 

 death, and toys for an infant, as also in antiquity to the recent 

 benefit of our museums, and ask whether our immediate fore- 

 fathers, not to speak of primitive Europeans, were so remote 

 from the natives of Africa. As the Greenlanders pass the 

 corpse out through a window and the Siamese breach the wall 

 for its passage, so the Basuto break down a part of the reed 

 fence rather than carry it through the gate. The idea is that 

 the dead must not know the way back ; when he comes to haunt 

 he will find the breach repaired : for the same reason an Irish 

 funeral must pass across running water. The Basuto make an 

 offering, on the grave, of milk and the contents of the stomach 

 of an ox sacrificed, saying " U re roballe " (sleep for us). 

 Funeral offerings of food, shared also by the living, who there- 

 by hold commimion with the dead (cf. the ghosts drinking the 

 blood in the Nekuia of the Odyssey) are. of course, very wide- 

 spread. In some part of Africa burial takes place beneath the 

 threshold, and blood is regularly poured down a hole into the 

 mouth of the corpse; a similar state of things has been 

 suspected in some Palestinian graves. Sometimes the corpse 

 itself furnished forth the funeral feast, and that quite near 

 home, if the sin eating (as it was called), i.e., the drinking of a 

 bowl of milk over the corpse by near relatives which have 

 survived (in Wales and parts of Western England) is really a 

 relic of the pre-Aryan cannibalism of the British Isles alluded 

 to by Strabo. 



Before we leave these miry places, I must mention one more 

 custom of primitive Europeans which should give us pause 

 before we despise the African. Again it was my deacon who 

 enlightened me upon the point. He said, as we were riding one 

 day, that the old custom of the Basuto was that when their 

 parents became very old and could no longer feel life more than 

 a burden, they took them (not down to the Ganges) but up to 

 some hill-top (like Moses) and there left them. They went 

 some three days after, perhaps found them still alive, but 

 drowsy ; they stole away and came again on the morrow to find 

 life extinct. I, in virtuous indignation, answered that my fore- 

 fathers were far crueller than the black man in war, and carved 

 their vanquished enemies into bloodeagles, etc., but that thev 

 would never have dreamed of treating their parents so. Alas I 

 some days after I read that the primitive fashion of Britain 



