NO. 61. — 1908.] RECENT WORK AMONG THE VEDDAS. 77 



on a chena, so caves, if small, are the property of a single 

 family, or if large enough to hold several families, each family 

 has a piece of cave floor on which to sleep, cook, squat, and 

 keep its possessions, and each man and woman keeps as strictly 

 to his or her portion of the cave as if it were fenced in. Besides 

 hunting land and pools and stretches of river, in which any 

 member of a community might hunt and fish, there were also 

 areas of land within the communal land which, in a limited 

 sense, were the property of individuals, and upon which no 

 one would hunt without their owner's permission, and if game 

 started on other land was killed on such private land a portion 

 of the game would be handed over to the owner of the land. 

 Such privately owned land would often be given as a marriage 

 portion, but never until the matter had been discussed between 

 the owner and the other men of the small community. There 

 was also a similar limited right of private property in rocks 

 and cliffs known to be the haunt of the rock-bee, though the 

 practical effect of such private property, except perhaps from 

 the point of view of game preservation, was nullified by the 

 certainty that all game killed or honey gathered would, if in 

 sufficient quantity, be divided among the members of the 

 community. 



On the psychical side, the life of this folk is unusually 

 limited in every aspect except one, namely, their regard for 

 the dead, and even this regard, which attains the intensity of 

 a cult, has given rise to no decorative art ; indeed a number 

 of crude drawings, for the most part of animals and men, 

 executed on the walls of certain caves, were the only examples 

 of decorative art seen, and personal adornment is at the lowest 

 ebb. But although this cult has produced no pictorial or 

 plastic art, it has given rise to a series of dances, often panto- 

 mimic, and so, perhaps, in the nature of imitative magic, 

 but whether pantomimic or not, accompanied, except in 

 a few instances, by offerings of food to the spirits of the 

 departed. To understand these and the ceremonies to 

 be presently described, it is necessary to consider the Vedda 

 attitude towards death. Although there is no formulated 

 idea of a death contagion , the rapidity with which all Veddas 

 leave the site of a death, and avoid it for years, shows that 



