66 



♦ KNOWLEDGE . 



[July 25, 1884. 



Macusi, though better in health, was so enraged against 

 me that he refused to stir, for he declared that, with great 

 want of consideration for his weak liealth, I had taken him 

 out during the night and had made him haul the canoe up 

 a series of difficult cataracts. Nothing could persuade him 

 that this was but a dream, and it was some time before he 

 was so far pacified as to throw himself sulkily into the 

 bottom of the canoe. At that time we were all suffering 

 from a great scarcity of food, and, hunger having its usual 

 effect in producing vivid dreams, similar events frequently 

 occurred. More than once, the men declared in the morn- 

 ing that some absent man, whom they named, had come 

 daring the night, and had Ijeaten, or otherwise maltreated 

 them ; and they insisted on much rubbing of the bruised 

 parts of their bodies. Another instance was amusing. In 

 the middle of one night I was awakened by an Arawak 

 named Sam, the captain or head-man of the Indians who 

 were with me, only to be told the bewildering words, 

 ' George speak me very bad, boss ; you cut his bits ! ' 

 It was some time before I could collect my senses 

 sufficiently to remember that 'bits,' or fourpenny- 

 pieces, are the units in which, among Creoles and semi- 

 civilised Indians, calculation of money, and consequently 

 of wages, is made ; that to cut bits means to reduce the 

 number of bits, or wages, given ; and to understand that 

 Captain Sam, having dreamed that his subordinate George 

 had spoken insolently to him, the former, with a fine sense 

 of the dignity of his office, now insisted that the culprit 

 should be punished in real life. One more incident, of 

 which the same Sam was the hero, may be told for the 

 sake of the humour, though it did not happen within my 

 personal experience, but was told me by a friend. This 

 friend, in whose employ Sam was at the time, told his man, 

 as they sat round the tire one night, of the Zulu or some 

 other African war which was then in progress, and in so 

 doing inadvertently made frequent use of the expression, 

 ' to punish the niggers.' That night, after all in camp had 

 been asleep for some time, they were raised by loud cries 

 for help. Sam, who was one of the most powerful Indians 

 I ever saw, was ' punishing a nigger ' who happened to be 

 one of the party ; with one hand he had firmly grasped 

 the back of the breeches-band of the black man, and had 

 twisted this round so tightly that the poor wretch was 

 almost cut in two. Sam sturdily maintained that he had 

 received orders from his master for this outrageous conduct, 

 and on inquiry, it turned out that he had dreamed this."* 

 * Taking an illustration from nearer home, although from 

 a more remote time, we have in the Scandinavian Tatns- 

 dajla Saga a curious account of three Finns who were shut 

 up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a 

 Norwegian chief, to visit Iceland, and inform him of the 

 line of the country where he was to settle. Their bodies 

 became rigid, and they sent their souls on their errand, and, 

 on their awaking at the end of three days, gave an accurate 

 account of the Vatnsdal, in which Ingimund ultimately 

 dwelt. No wonder that in media-val times, when witches 

 swept the air and harried the cattle, swooning and other 

 forms of insensibility were adduced in support of the theory 

 of soul-absence, or that we find among savages — as the 

 Tajals of the Luzon islands — objections to waking a sleeper 

 lest the soul happens to be out of the body. As a corollary 

 to this belief in soul-absence, fear arises lest it be prolonged 

 to the peril of the owner, and hence a rough and ready 

 theory of the cause of disease is framed, for savages rarely 

 die in their beds. 



That disease is a derangement of functions interrupting 

 their natural action, and carrying attendant pain as its 



• " Among the Indians of Guiana," pp. 3i4-346. 



indication, could not enter the head of the uncivilised; and, 

 indeed, among ourselves a cold or a fever is commonly 

 thought of as an entity in th« body which has stolen in, 

 and, having been caught, must be somehow expelled. With 

 the universal primitive belief in spiritual agencies every- 

 where inhaled with the breath or swallowed with the food 

 or drink, all diseases were regarded as their work, whether, 

 as remarked above, through undue absence of the rightful 

 spirit or subtle entrance of some hostile one. If these be 

 the causes to which sicknesses are due, obviously the only 

 cure is to get rid of them, and hence the sorcerer and the 

 medicine-man find their services in request in casting out 

 the demon by force, or enticing him by cajolery, or in 

 bringing back the truant soul. 



THE ANTARCTIC REGIONS. 



By Richard A. Pkoctor. 



(Continued from p. 56.) 



IF we consider the nature of the Antarctic Seas, and 

 particularly the circumstance that the Antarctic 

 summer is far colder than the Arctic summer, it will appear 

 most probable that within the Antarctic regions land and 

 water are so distributed that, while the shore-lines are of 

 great extent, there is very free communication with the 

 open Antarctic Ocean. In other words, it seems reason- 

 able to conclude that there are many large islands within 

 the Antarctic circle, that these islands are separated from 

 each other by wide passages, and not by straits readily 

 blocked up and encumbered with ice in such sort as to 

 impede the outward passage of the great icebergs. And 

 nothing which has been ascertained by Antarctic voyagers 

 is opposed to this conclusion. It is, indeed, very easy to 

 fall into the mistake of inferring otherwise from the study 

 of an ordinary chart of the Antarctic seas. If, for example, 

 we look at the chart in ]^Iaury's " Physical Geography of 

 the Sea," we are apt to imagine that the boundary line 

 indicating the limits of Antarctic explorations points to 

 the existence of a continuous barrier of ice, the advanced 

 line of defence, as it were, behind which lies as continuous 

 a barrier of precipitous shore-line. But a very slight study 

 of the records of Antarctic voyages will suffice to show how 

 erroneous is such an impression. We find that long before 

 coast-lines have been seen, the hardy voyagers have found 

 themselves impeded and often surrounded by masses of 

 floating ice. Wilkes, Ross, and D'Urville, when struggling 

 to advance towards the southern pole, were repeatedly com- 

 pelled to retreat without seeing any signs of land. Land 

 has not been seen, indeed, along more than one-sixth part 

 of the circuit of the Antarctic barrier, and it has only been 

 in the neighbourhood of Victoria Land that a continuous 

 coast-line of any considerable extent has been discovered. 

 Wherever land has been seen, it has been mountainous and 

 rugged — a circumstance which suggests great irregularity 

 of outline in the land-regions, and the high probability that 

 these regions are broken up into islands resembling those in 

 the north-polar seas. 



Certainly, there is much in what has been learned or may 

 be inferred respecting the Antarctic regions, to suggest the 

 wish that further explorations may one day be undertaken. 

 When we consider what has been done with sailing-ships, it 

 seems by no means unlikely that with steamships suitably 

 constructed the Antarctic seas might be successfully ex- 

 plored. I would not encourage the idle ambition to pene- 

 trate so many miles farther southward than has hitherto 

 been found practicable. But there are many and legitimate 



