IMAGES AND NAMES. 131 



of tlie thief.^ In New Zealand, when a male cliild had been 

 baptized in the native manner, and had received its name, they 

 thrust small pebbles, the size of a large pin's head, down its 

 throat, to make its heart callous, hard, and incapable of pity.^ 

 The Red Indian hunter wears ornaments of the claws of the 

 grizzly bear, that he may be endowed with its courage and fero- 

 city,^ a simpler charm than that whereby the magicians made 

 men invincible in Pliny's time, in which the head and tail of a 

 dragon, marrow of a lion and hair from his forehead, foam of a 

 victorious racehorse, and claws of a dog, were bound together 

 in a piece of deerskin, with alternate sinews of a deer and a 

 gazelle.* Many of the food-prejudices of savage races depend 

 on the belief which belongs to this class of superstitions, that 

 the qualities of the eaten pass into the eater. Thus, among the 

 Dayaks, young men sometimes abstain from the flesh of deer, 

 lest it should make them timid, and before a pig-hunt they 

 avoid oil, lest the game should slip tlirough their fingers,^ and 

 in the same way the flesh of slow-going and cowardly animals 

 is not to be eaten by the warriors of South America ; but they 

 love the meat of tigers, stags, and boars, for courage and speed.^ 

 An English merchant in Shanghai, at the time of the Taeping 

 attack, met his Chinese servant carrying home a heart, and 

 asked him what he had got there. He said it was the heart of 

 a rebel, and that he was going to take it home and eat it to 

 make him brave. 



When a Maori war-party is to start, the priests set up sticks in 

 the ground to represent the warriors, and he whose stick is blown 

 down is to fall in the battle. ^ In the Fiji Islands, the diviner 

 will shake a bunch of dry cocoa-nuts to see whether a sick 

 child will die ; if all fall ofi", it will recover ; if any remain on, it 

 will die. He will spin a cocoa-nut, and decide a question ac- 

 cording to where the eye of the nut looks towards when at rest 

 again, or he will sit on the ground and take omens from his 

 legs ; if the right leg trembles first, it is good ; if the left, it is 



^ Kracheninnikow, Descr. du Kamtohatka; Paris, 1768, p. 22. Klemm, C. Gr., 

 vol. ii. p. 297. " Yate, p. 83. ^ Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 69. 



* Pliii., xxix. 20. 6 St. John, vol. i. p. 176. 



« Dobrizhoffer, vol. i. p. 258. 7 Polaek, vol. i. p. 270. 



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