224 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



about spirits and their behaviour. A man falls 

 asleep and dreams certain things ; on waking, he 

 believes that these things actually happened ; and 

 he therefore concludes that the dead who came to 

 him or to whom he went in his dreams, are alive ; 

 that the friend or foe whom he knows to be far 

 away, but with whom he feasted or fought in dream- 

 land, came to him. He sees another man fall into 

 a swoon or trance that may lay him seemingly life- 

 less for hours or even days ; he himself may be 

 attacked by deranging fevers and see visions stranger 

 than those which a healthy person sees ; shadows of 

 himself and of objects, both living and not living, 

 follow or precede him and lengthen or shorten in 

 the withdrawing or advancing light ; the still water 

 throws back images of himself ; the hillsides resound 

 with mocking echoes of his words and of sounds 

 around him ; and it is these and allied phenomena 

 which have given rise to the notion of * another self/ 

 to use Mr. Spencer's convenient term, or of a number 

 of selves that are sometimes outside the man and 

 sometimes inside him, as to which the barbaric mind 

 is never sure. Outside him, however, when the man 

 is sleeping, so that he must not be awakened, lest 

 this * other self be hindered from returning ; or when 

 he is sick, or in the toils of the medicine-man, who 

 may hold the 'other self in his power, as in the 

 curious soul-trap of the Polynesians a series of 

 cocoa-nut rings in which the sorcerer makes believe 

 to catch and detain the soul of an offender or sick 

 person. When Dr. Catat and his companions, MM. 

 Maistre and Foucart were exploring the 'Bara' 

 country on the west coast of Madagascar the people 



