Appendix. — Stray Notes on Obeah. 131 



and the promised results are not forthcoming, this is quite explicable on 

 the ground that of course the wrong plant was used — and so on. But 

 should the request demanded be beyond the powers or wishes of 

 the o'ueah-man to effect, what more easy than his advising the 

 applicant to employ a piece of " water-mamma " skin or any other 

 object equally impossible to obtain possession of. In the particular 

 case under review I should not be at all surprised to learn that 

 Bukridi, the obeah-man, was at the very outset really unwilling to 

 carry out the job, and purposely asked for a practical impossibility, or 

 what he thought to be so — a white man's child : he surely must have fore- 

 seen not only that such an one must be difficult to obtain, but that its dis- 

 appearance would create an unusual stir at least throughout the 

 neighbourhood. 



The sacrifice of human life in connection with witchcraft and sorcery 

 as it is known to Europeans or obeah to the West Indians, the Guianese, 

 and others, is not so extremely rare within recent times as might have 

 been expected. In Hayti we have the British Minister Resident's author- 

 ity for stating that " in 1863 a female child 6 years of age is sacrificed by 

 " strangulation : the skin is removed and the flesh and body eaten." So 

 again, in the same country " a French priest is witness at a ceremony in 

 " 1869 when a child is about to be sacrificed." But without going so far 

 back into the past, H. L. Adams tells us in his " Oriental Crime," with 

 information culled from official sources, that "there is no doubt that 

 " children are even now occasionally sacrificed in India from superstitious 

 " motives." Edgar Thurston, the superintendent of the Madras Govern- 

 ment Museum and of the Ethnological Survey, in his Omens and 

 Superstitions of Southern India writes that " several cases of pregnant 

 " women's murder are recorded to obtain the foetus : believed to work 

 " spells with it." He also states that in India, the belief in the efficacy of 

 human sacrifice as a means of discovering hidden treasure is widespread : 

 a female infant is kidnapped and murdered in one case, and a man kills 

 his own child for the same purpose in another. Both cases are recent. 



The employment of human hair in the way of charms, talismans, and 

 other superstitious purposes is world-wide, it only being necessary to 

 note here those relating to Africa, India, the West Indies and Guiana — 

 the native countries of the accused. In Africa, the belief is common that 

 people may be bewitched through the clippings of their hair ; they may be 

 used as hostages for the good behaviour of the persons from whose 

 bodies they have been taken, fetishes can be made of hair : it may be 

 buried or deposited in the branches of trees, while white man's hair is 

 fetish of the first order. In India hair may be used as omens in magic 

 and as offerings to certain deities. In the Guianas the superstitions 

 connected with human hair have been recorded in Eoth's " Enquiry into 

 the Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana Indians." 



The nails in the trees, the evidence of which has come out during 

 the course of the trial, has its counterpart in most of the habitable 



