22 King, Folk-lore of the North American Indians. 



probably not tell what he meant by the word " soul " 

 himself.* 



A Huron chief explained (x., 287), to Father Breboeuf, 

 that there were two sorts of souls. One separates itself 

 from the body at death, but remains in the cemetery till 

 the Feast of the Dead, then it changes into a turtle dove 

 or goes away to the Village of the Dead in the West. The 

 Mengwe Indians let loose a bird over the grave to carry 

 off the ghostly self. The other kind of soul, the chief 

 said, is bound to the body and informs the corpse. It 

 remains in the ditch of the dead after the Feast and never 

 leaves it, unless someone bears it again as a child. How 

 €lse was it that the living resembled the dead ? This soul 

 apparently was specially connected with the bones, and 

 hence comes the careful treatment of the bones, whether 

 •of human beings or of animals, as we have already seen. 



The Dacotas say that at death everyone is decomposed 

 into four ghostly individualities, of which one flies to the 

 land of shades, the second goes into the air, the third 

 remains in the corpse, the fourth wanders about the 

 village. 



In Calabar, too, everyone has four souls — (i) the 

 immortal soul, (2) the shadow in the path, (3) the dream 

 soul, (4) the bush soul. This last is somewhat detached. 

 A perfectly quiet, respectable man may have a most 

 rascally bush soul, which is always getting itself and 

 him into mischief. f 



Similarly, the Aruntas in Central Australia split the 

 personality of a human being into different ghostly parts.j 



To turn to a modern instance, it is said that Hartley 

 Coleridge when a boy was once asked, why he was called 



• Codrington, The Melanesians, their Anthropology ana Folk- Lore, p. 248. 

 t Miss Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, p. 460 ff, 

 X Spencer and Gillen, op. cit., p. 5 15. 



