Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/76

66 the sole cause of the birth of every human being who comes into the world."

Let me digress here for a moment to call your attention to a passage taken from a very different work. "The Erewhonians" it runs, "believe in pre-existence; and not only this . . . ., but they believe that it is of their own free act and deed in a previous state that they come to be born into this world at all. They hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the married of both sexes, fluttering about them incessantly, and giving them no peace of mind or body until they have consented to take them under their protection." I am not quoting now from an anthropological work, but from a very clever and amusing satire on English religion and social arrangements, published eight-and-twenty years ago by Mr. Samuel Butler. The author located the imaginary people whose customs he describes in the undiscovered interior lands of a British colony; and it would require very little straining of his words to suppose that the lands now found to be occupied by the Arunta were comprised in the district he had in mind.

We will leave our friends who are so positive that all (or nearly all) märchen came from India, or that the perplexing civilisations of America were derived from Asia, to reckon up the resemblances here, and to settle at their leisure whether the Arunta philosophy of birth is to be traced to Erewhon, or the Erewhonian philosophy to the Arunta. Meanwhile, we may return to the wandering bands from whom the Arunta of the present day derive their totems. I want you first to note that they are bands, and not single individuals, and next