202 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



eastern Ewhe districts and in Dahome the soul is 

 indeed, by either an inconsistency or a subtlety, 

 believed to remain in the land of the dead and to 

 animate some new child of the family at one and the 

 same time ; but it never animates an embryo in a 

 strange family. 1 This is attributed by Sir A. B. Ellis 

 to contact with the Yoruba who do not hold the 

 doctrine of the multiple soul. Among them, "as the 

 births at least equal in number the deaths, and the 

 process of being re-born is supposed to have gone on 

 * from the beginning,' logically there ought to be few, 

 if any, departed souls in Deadland ; but the natives do 

 not critically examine such questions as this, and they 

 imagine Deadland to be thickly populated, and at the 

 same time every newborn child, or almost every one, 

 to be a re-born ghost." 2 But other tribes hold that a 

 human being possesses as many as four souls. These 

 are differently enumerated by different authorities, 

 possibly speaking of different peoples, but perhaps 

 trying to interpret the vagueness and reconcile the 

 inconsistencies natural to men in the lower culture who 

 have not thought out the perplexing problems of 

 psychology awakened by their experiences and their 



1 Ellis, Tsht, 149; Ewe, 114; Burton, Gelele, ii. 158; Wander- 

 ings, ii. 173; Seidel, Globus, Ixxii. 21; Westermann, Arch. 

 Religionsw. viii. no. 



2 Ellis, Ewe, I.e.-, Yoruba, 129. The Bahuana, a Bantu tribe on 

 one of the tributaries of the Congo, speak of a soul called bun and 

 a double called doshi. The former (which is only possessed by 

 adults), if the deceased had been properly provided with fetishes, 

 enters the body of some large animal, such as an elephant hippo- 

 potamus buffalo or leopard, and an animal so possessed is re- 

 cognised by its ferocity. The doshi remains to visit its friends, 

 haunt its enemies and to persecute its relatives if the body have not 

 received a proper funeral (Torday and Joyce,/. A. I. xxxvi. 290). 



