262 SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



the parings of nails, hair, eyebrows, and spittle of the 

 victim, enough to represent every part of his person, and 

 then make them up into his likeness with wax from a 

 deserted bee's comb. The figure must be scorched slowly 

 over a lamp every night for seven nights, with the fol- 

 lowing words: 



" It is not wax that I am scorching, 

 It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch. ' ' 



After the seventh time the figure must be burned, and 

 the victim will die. 47 



On the principle that like produces like, the savage 

 does many things in deliberate imitation of the results 

 which he seeks to attain. The Indians of British Colum- 

 bia live largely upon the fish of their seas and rivers. If 

 the fish do not come in the expected season and the 

 Indians are in need of food, a wizard will make an 

 image of a swimming fish and place it in the water in the 

 direction from which the fish usually appear. This 

 ceremony when accompanied by a prayer that the fish 

 may come, will cause them to arrive at once. Some of 

 the tribes of Central Australia subsist upon a certain 

 grub, called the witchetty grub. They hold a ceremony 

 which consists of a pantomime representing the fully- 

 developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysa- 

 lis. A long narrow structure of branches is sot up to 

 imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a 

 number of men, who have the grub for their totem, sit 

 and sing of the creature in its various stages. After this 

 they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as they do 

 so, they sing of the insect emerging from the chrysalis. 



47 Ibid. 



