PHYSIOLOGICAL IGNORANCE 275 



visible. 1 The Niol-Niol of Dampier Land in north- 

 western Australia likewise hold birth to be wholly 

 independent of sexual intercourse. A man who has 

 never had intercourse with one of his wives is not 

 surprised, and no suspicion is awakened in his mind, 

 if she give birth to a child. For a child is not begotten 

 .by coition. It is engendered by conveyance into the 

 mother's body of a previously existing soul called a 

 Raia which has the power of assuming a body in this 

 way: a result only to be effected through the in_- 

 strumentaTity of the medicine man. 2 



The North Queenslander about Cape Bedford 

 believes that babies are made in the distant west, 

 where the sun sets, by nature-spirits living in the dense 

 scrub, who enter women either in shape of a curlew, 

 or rather of a spur-winged plover, if a girl, or of a 

 pretty snake, if a boy, ancLthere _return_to_the humaii 

 fbnrrwhlch properly belongs to them and so in due 

 time are born as children. So far from having 

 attained a true solution of the mystery of child-birth 

 are these unsophisticated natives that they believe a 



child thus rnnr^ivfiH_ln__bf! spnf in answer... to t^e 



husband's prayer as a punishment to his wife when he 



1 Globus, Ixxxvi. 381, citing Nieuwenhuis, Quer durch Borneo 

 (Leiden, 1904). The ignorance of the Bahau extends to other 

 details of the mechanism of conception. On the other hand so 

 little is pregnancy understood that among various peoples it is be- 

 lieved to be often of what we know to be unnatural length. Thus 

 the Mohammedan law, as we have seen, recognises the possibility of 

 a very extended gestation (supra, vol. i. p. 321). The Hos of 

 Togoland affirm that pregnancy in many cases extends for fourteen 

 fifteen or even sixteen months (Spieth, 198). 



2 Father Jos. Bischofs, Anthropos, iii. 35. The beliefs of other 

 natives of Western Australia to the same effect have already been 

 discussed, supra, vol. i. p. 243. 



