2 8o PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



that God makes babies out of the under-jaws of 

 deceased members of the same family, supplying the 

 muscles and other fleshy parts from potter's clay, which 

 he kneads to the right shape, and then secretly inserts 

 them thus made in the tiniest possible human form 

 into the womb. 1 The Indians on the Amazon River 

 do indeed recognise paternity as a present phenomenon, 

 but they account for the various objects of the universe 

 by motherhood alone : the sun is the mother of the 

 living beings and the moon of vegetables unassisted 

 by any masculine power. 2 Thus while they have come 

 to recognise the common course of nature to-day they 

 still hesitate to attribute the same conditions to the 

 sacred objects of their faith. The notion of paternity 

 is absent from the Toda word for father : 3 hence the 

 father obtained for the expected child by means of the 

 bow-and-arrow ceremony is not a begetter but merely a 

 man who undertakes certain duties with regard to 

 mother and offspring, and as often as not is not the 

 real parent. Indeed, while the word for mother in 



1 Spieth, 558. It seems to be for this reason that the under- 

 jaws of fallen foes adorn their sacred ivory trumpets and drums 

 as trophies of victory, for in this way it may be suggested they 

 would be kept out of reach of the procreating divinity (H. Klose, 

 Globus, Ixxxix. 12). Among the Guans, another branch of the 

 Ewhe, the god appears not to restrict himself to under-jaws of the 

 same family in fabricating new human human beings (cf. supra, vol. 

 i. p. 246, where the word goddess is an error for god). The under- 

 jaw of a dead king of the Baganda used always to be cut off at 

 burial and preserved in a wooden dish (Cunningham, 226). This 

 is comprehensible if the jaw were deemed necessary for the con- 

 tinuation of his posterity. 



2 Nery, 250. In the same way a hero of the Narrinyeri is 

 declared to have no father, only a mother (Taplin, Narrinyeri^ 43). 

 He is now a star. 



3 Rivers, Todas, 517 note. 



