TRANSFORMATION 223 



in re-birth. It may notwithstanding be observed that 

 it is a common belief in the lower culture that a name 

 is an essential part of its owner. It is much more than 

 a mere label : it is looked upon as having a real 

 objective existence. The knowledge of the name gives 

 power over the person or thing designated. This is 

 the origin of innumerable magical practices. It 

 accounts for the reluctance of savages to tell their 

 names, for their propensity to adopt by-names by which 

 they may usually be called without disclosing their 

 true and proper names, and for the very general 

 taboo of the names of the dead. Although therefore 

 we are unable to discover any existing belief in the re- 

 birth of an ancestor in many cases where the practice 

 exists of giving an ancestral name to a child, still that 

 belief may have been in earlier times at the root of the 

 custom. Such a belief is quite likely to have faded 

 with the advancing dawn of civilisation into the belief 

 attributed to some of the Eskimo that the deceased 

 whose name is thus appropriated becomes ipso facto a 

 kind of guardian spirit to its new bearer, or into 

 the analogous reason adduced by the Bontoc Igorot of 

 northern Luzon for their invariable practice of giving a 

 child the name of some dead ancestor. They allege 

 that by so doing they will secure for the child the 

 protection of the anito, or manes, of the ancestor in 

 question. "If the child does not prosper or has 

 accidents or ill health, the parents will seek a more 

 careful or more benevolent proctector in the anito of 

 some other ancestor ; " and the child is thereafter 

 known by the name of the latter. 1 



1 Jenks, 62. Compare the belief in Belgium, and probably other 

 Roman Catholic countries, that to give a child the name of a saint 



