76 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



intent, stepped over the decapitated body seven times, 

 also without speaking ; and others again dipped in 

 the blood a piece of cotton wool, which they after- 

 wards made use of in a manner which Mr. Lane 

 declines to mention. 1 



In the Panjab also indescribable cures for barrenness 

 are often adopted. One of the more respectable 

 remedies is said to be that of bathing over a dead 

 body. For this purpose murder is even committed. 

 Another is that of eating a loaf cooked on the still 

 burning pyre of a man who was never married and 

 therefore never transmitted life, and who was the only 

 or eldest son in his family and so received the fullest 

 possible measure of vitality. 2 Low caste women 

 believe that bathing underneath a person who has 

 been hanged is efficacious. Women of the middle- 

 classes with the same object try to obtain a piece of 

 the wood of the gallows. 3 In Gujarat, when a Jain 

 ascetic of the Dundiya sect dies in pursuance of a 

 vow to starve himself, women who seek the blessing 

 of a son try to secure it by creeping under the litter 

 on which his corpse is removed, or by joining in 

 the scramble for fragments of his clothes. 4 Some 

 at least of these practices (and the list might be 



1 Lane, i. 393, 394. There is an analogous way of treating 

 barren cows in German East Africa (Globus, Ixxxvii. 308). 



2 Census of Ind. 1901, xvii. 164. Sir R. C. Temple records a 

 case of conviction of two women, a mother and daughter, of Daboli 

 in the Panjab. The mother desired a male child and being told by 

 the faqir that if she killed the eldest son or daughter of some one 

 and bathed over the body she would have her wish gratified, she 

 with her daughter's help seized and murdered a child answering the 



equirements and performed the ceremony (/. A. 7. xxxii. 237). 



3 N. Ind. N. and Q. i. 86. Cf.J. A. I. xxxv. 278. 



4 Forbes, Ras Mala, 611 ; Daya, 82. 



