110 IMAGES AND NAMES. 



part of Africa tlie practice prevails, tliat whenever twin" chil- 

 dren are born, one or both of them are immediately killed. 

 Among the Wanyamwezi, one of the two is always killed ; and, 

 strange to say, " the universal custom amongst these tribes, is 

 for the mother to wrap a gourd or calabash in skins, to place it 

 to sleep with, and feed it like, the survivor."^ Among the Be- 

 chuanas, it is a custom for married women to carry a doll with 

 them till they have a child, when the doll is discarded. There 

 is one of these dolls in the London Missionary Museum, con- 

 sisting simply of a long calabash, like a bottle, wound round 

 with strings of beads. The Basuto women use clay dolls in the 

 same way, giving them the names of tutelary deities, and treat- 

 ing them as children.^ Among the Ostyaks of Eastern Si- 

 beria, there is found a still more instructive case, in which we 

 see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual 

 idol. When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of 

 him, which receives offerings and has honours paid to it, and 

 the widow embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these 

 images are buried at the end of three years or so, but some- 

 times the image of a shaman^ is set up permanently, and re- 

 mains as a saint for ever.* 



The principal use of images to races in the lower, stages of 

 civilization is that to which their name of " the visible," eXhtaXov, 

 idol, has come to be in great measure restricted in modem lan- 

 guage. The idol answers to the savage in one province of 

 thought the same purpose that its analogue the doll does to 

 the child. It enables him to give a definite existence and a 

 personality to the vague ideas of higher beings, which his mind 

 can hardly grasp without some material aid. How these ideas 

 came into the minds of even the lowest savages, need not be 

 discussed here ; it is sufficient to know that, so far as we have 

 accurate information, they seem to be present everywhere in 

 at least a rudimentary state. 



' Burton, ' Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 23. ^ CasaKs, p. 251. 



' A shaman is a native sorcerer or medicine-man. His name is corrupted from 

 Sanskrit 9ramana, a Buddhist ascetic, a term Tvliich is one of the many relics of 

 Buddhism in Northern Asia, having been naturalized into the groveUing fetish- 

 worship of the Ostyaks and Tunguzes. See Weber, ' Indische Skizzen,' p. 66. 



•• El-man, ' Eeise um die Erde ; ' Berlin, 1833-48, vol. ii. p. 677. 



