330 Notes on Sport and Travel m 



higher than a lifelong teaching could ever give to 

 the lower cur. They will not, in fact, recognise that 

 man is an animal, and under the laws which govern 

 the development of other animals. 



Far better would it have been had the missionaries 

 perceived that what they took for superstitions, and 

 iniquities, and devil -dancings, were infantile and 

 necessary imperfections required by the immature 

 one, like the crowings and kickings of the blessed 

 babe. Indeed, I doubt whether the excitements of 

 what is called ' religion ' can be safely indulged in by 

 the earlier or even the later races, without some sort 

 of vocal and saltatory accompaniment, congestion of 

 the lungs and brain being imminent. Hence possibly 

 the frequent change of posture during prolonged 

 services among ourselves, and the loud explosive 

 ' Hums ! ' among the old Puritans, and, I believe, 

 certain religionists in our own time — particularly in 

 America, where dancing ' piously ' still obtains, more 

 commonly than among the Roman Catholics of 

 Spain, who, however, preserve traces of it. Long- 

 continued ' religious exercises ' without movement 

 are dangerous ; producing ecstaticism in the more 

 civilised man, and that state of blue blood in the 

 brain of the native which delivers him over a prey 

 to the sham mysteries of the Mumbo-Jumbo man. 



Hold your breath long enough and you can see 

 or believe anything ; ^ as the Maori and Esquimaux 

 Tohungas well knew, and others nearer home. 



^ There is nothing you cannot hear if you listen long enough. 



