114. 
people often intentionally tell falsehoods, because they fear to divulge 
the truth. Knowing this tendency, there is, of course, a certain amount. 
of suspicion cast upon the information which comes to us, and therefore 
we must receive it with a good deal of reserve, and a feeling that we ¢an 
hardly draw any very reliable conclusion from it. These tribes retain the 
belief, although in an exceedingly dim manner, in a Supreme God. The gods 
they really worship and fear—for their religion is wholly one of. intense 
fear—are for the most part those minor and malignant deities who are 
the spirits of departed persons. Their imagination fills the forests and 
villages with these spirits, and they spend their lives in terror of them. This 
is one of the reasons which account for the extremely migratory habits of 
these people, who can hardly be induced to remain more than two or three 
years at the same spot. This is partly due to their peculiar method of 
cultivation; they cut down the forest, and burn it, in order to manure 
the land with the ashes, which give them rich crops for two or three years ; 
and, when they have thus used up all the land around a village, they are 
naturally disposed to move somewhere else. Another and a frequent cause 
of the breaking up of their settlements is, however, the terror inspired by the 
spirits of the departed. Perhaps one or two deaths have occurred rather 
suddenly—perhaps there may have been three or four, more than they 
expected. These deaths they attribute to one of the spirits, and therefore 
abandon the village and move somewhere else; and this constitutes one 
of the difficulties we have in the civilisation of these tribes. It is certainly 
a great obstacle in the way of their christianisation, and is so found to be 
by those who labour among them with a view to their evangelisation. 
The paper very accurately describes some of the customs of these people. 
They practise divination and witchcraft, and hold to the custom of 
using a corpse, when it is being conveyed to the place of burial or burning, 
to indicate the house of the person to whose means the death is at- 
tributable. This custom has always prevailed among them. The corpse 
‘is taken up by four bearers, who go staggeringly and uncertainly along 
through the village; and, if one sees a house belonging to a man to whom 
he wishes to do an ill turn, he pushes in that direction, while the others, 
feeling the pressure, also move towards the same point until they come up 
against the house of the person so singled out, and he is thereupon believed 
to have been the person causing the death. The punishments meted out 
in such cases are, however, far more serious than those stated in this paper. 
Even impaling was not at all uncommon before the advent of British 
power. f may here say, in reference to a remark in this paper, that, 
human sacrifices were certainly at one time common among all these tribes. 
In the district to which I have referred they carried on the practice down 
to a recent period, and it is only within the last two or three years I have 
heard of more than one instance occurring within a few miles of a govern- 
ment civil station, in which there was quite a panic among the people, in 
consequence of a report that some one or other would be carried off for 
sacrifice. This, at any rate, shows that there is still an impression that 
