TRANSFORMATION 209 



she is brought back as a bride. This custom prevails 

 among the Khanna, Kapur, Malhotra, Kakar and 

 Chopra, the highest sections of the Khatris. These 

 ideas are an almost logical outcome of the doctrine of 

 the metempsychosis, and it as inevitably results that if 

 the first-born be a girl, she is peculiarly ill-omened, so 

 that among the Khatris of Multan she used to be put 

 to death." I 



I cited some pages back a custom of the Gold Coast, 

 from which it appears that children dying young are 

 apt to return to their parents in the next pregnancy. 

 The phenomenon appears also in India. In Bengal, 

 if " a woman give birth to several stillborn children in 

 succession, the popular belief is that the same child 

 reappears on each occasion. So, to frustrate the 

 designs of the evil spirit that has taken possession of 

 the child, the nose or a portion of the ear is cut off 

 and the body is cast on a dunghill." 2 In the Panjab, 

 Hindu women who lose a female child during infancy, 

 or while it still sucks milk, take it into the jungle and 

 put it in a sitting position under a tree. Sugar is put 

 into its mouth and a corded roll of cotton between its 

 ringers. Then the mother says in Panjabi : 



Eat the sugar ; spin the cotton ; 

 Don't come back, but send a brother. 



If on the following day it be found that the dogs or 



1 Census of Indict^ 1901, xvii. 215. So the Bakairi of Brazil are 

 said to call a child, whether boy or girl, " little father," as though a 

 new birth of the father ; and among the Tupi the father after the 

 birth of each new son took a new name. The Bakairi reckon 

 kinship through the mother ; but there are indications of transition 

 to reckoning through the father (von den Steinen, 337). 



2 Crooke, F. L. N. Ind. ii. 67. 



