lOOG REPORT— 1898. 



Except that he supposes them to he a relic of hettev times, the poet's dream of 

 a (golden age no doubt still ringing in his ears, Bacon had, in this as in many other 

 matters, a clear insight into the meaning of things. 



Another idea that appears among verj' early and primitive peoples, and has 

 had in all time a powerful influence on mankind, is that of a separable spirit. 

 The aborigines of North- West Central Queensland, who have lately been studied 

 to such excellent purpose by Dr. Walter Roth, the brother of a much-esteemed past 

 officer of this Section, are in many respects low in the scale of humanity ; yet they 

 possess this idea. They believe that the ghost, or shade, or spirit of some one 

 departed can so initiate an individual into the mysteries of the craft of doctor or 

 medicine-man as to enable him, by the use of a death-bone apparatus, to produce 

 sickness and death in another. This apparatus is supposed to extract blood from 

 the victim against whom it is pointed without actual contact, and to insert in him 

 some foreign substance. They will not go alone to the grave of a relative for fear 

 of seeing his ghost. It appears that they have the fancy that Europeans are 

 ghosts. The Tasmanians also, as Mr. Ling Roth himself tells us, had the same 

 fancy as to the Europeans, and believed that the dead could act upon the living. 

 The Pawnee Indians, we are assured by Mr. Grinnell, believe that the spirits of 

 the dead live after their bodies are dust. They imagine that the little whirlwinds 

 often seen in summer are ghosts. The Blackfeet think the shadow of a person is 

 his soul, and that while the soul? of the good are allowed to go to the sand-hills, 

 those of the bad remain as ghosts near the place where they died. The Shillooks 

 of Central Africa are said to believe that the ghostly spectres of the dead are always 

 invisibly present with the living, and accompany them wherever they ^^o. The 

 aborigines of Samoa believed in a land of ghosts, to which the spirits of the 

 deceased were carried immediately after death. The religious system of the 

 Amazulu, as described by Bishop Callaway, rests largely on the foundation of 

 belief in the continued activity of the disembodied spirits of deceased ancestors. 



Mr. Bryce, in his ' Impressions of South Africa,' says that at Lszapi, in 

 Mashonaland, are three huts, one of which is roofed, and is the grave of a famous 

 chief, whose official name was Makoni. ' On the irrave there stands a large 

 earthenware pot, which used to be regularly filled with native beer when, once a 

 year, about the anniversary of his death, his sons and other descendants came to 

 venerate and propitiate his ghost Five years ago, when the white men came into 

 the country, the ceremony was disused, and the poor ghost is now left without 

 honour and nutriment. The pot is broken, and another pot, which stood in an 

 adjoining hut, and was used by the worshippers, has disappeared. The place, how- 

 ever, retains its awesome character, and a native boy who was with lis would not 

 enter it. The sight brought vividly to mind the similar spirit worship which went 

 on among the Romans, and which goes on to-day in China ; hut I could not 

 ascertain for how many generations back an ancestral ghost receives these atten- 

 tions — a point which has remained obscure in the case of Roman ghosts also.' 



The aborigines of New Britain are said to believe that the ghosts of their 

 deceased ancestors exercise a paramount inlluence on human affairs, for good or 

 for evil. They have the poetical idea that the stars are lamps held out by the 

 ghosts to light the path of those who are to follow in their footsteps. On the 

 other hand, they think these ancestral ghosts are most malicious during full moon. 

 Not to multiply instances, we may say with Mr. Staniland Wake, it is much to 

 be doubted whether there is any race of vmcivilised men who are not firm believers 

 in the existence of spirits or ghosts. If this is so, and the idea of a separable 

 spirit, capable of feeling and of action apart from the body, is found to be practi- 

 cally universal among mankind, and to have been excogitated by some of the least 

 advanced among peoples; and if we observe how large a share that idea hns in 

 forming the dogmas of the more specialised religions of the present day, we shall 

 not see anything inherently unreasonable in the generalisation that the gi-oup of 

 theories and practices which constitute the great province of man's emotions and 

 mental operations expressed in the term ' religion ' has passed through the same 

 etages and produced itself in the same way from these early rude beginnings of 

 the religious sentiment as every other mental exertion. "We shall see in religion as 



