TRANSFORMATION 245 



whose duty it is to prevent them from escaping and to 

 supply them with water. The latter he does by means 

 of an underground communication with the river, about 

 a mile away. "When a child is to be born this old 

 man sees to the business." l 



The question where this baby-factory was was solved 

 by the ancient Mexicans in favour of the kingdom of the 

 dead. Accordingly an epithet for that realm was tlaca- 

 pillachiualoya, the place where the children of men 

 are produced, or engendered. 2 The same solution has 

 been reached by the Santals of the Rajmahal Hills, 

 in India. Every Santal who bears the sika, or tribal 

 mark, on his left forearm, after death enters the 

 kingdom of the gods, and is employed by them "in 

 grinding the bones of past generations with a pestle 

 made of the wood of the castor-oil-tree in order to 

 provide the gods with a good supply of material to 

 produce the children yet unborn." This is the 

 continual occupation to which a Santal looks forward 

 in the next life, interrupted only by a periodical festival 

 similar to those he loved on earth, or by a momentary 



1 Mathews, Proc. R. Soc. N.S.W. xl. 113; Ethnol Notes, 148, 

 citing Trans. R. Soc. S. Austr. xvii. 262. 



2 Preuss, Arch. Religionsw. vii. 234. Compare a tradition by 

 which the origin of the present race of mankind was attributed to a 

 bone of a previous race, fetched from Hell and sprinkled with the 

 blood of sixteen hundred supernatural heroes. A boy and then SL 

 girl are thus formed from it; and they become the ancestors of 

 all nations (Southey, Commonpl. Bk. iv. 142, quoting some authority 

 not indicated). The Maidu of California in a cosmogonic legend 

 speak of an Earthmaker who forms figures in shape like men, but 

 barely as big as a tiny seed. These he plants by pairs in the earth 

 at different places to grow into men and women. At the appointed 

 time they come forth ; the earlier races are all killed or transformed, 

 and are supplant ecj by the pairs who have risen from the earth and 

 their children (Dixon, Journ. Am. F. L. xvi. 33). 



