Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/52

24 of all sorts. His appetites are hearty. But he can at least claim this merit, that he has not based a philosophy on the desire to wax fat. On the other hand, notions of the type of mana or orenda, which are of a nascently philosophic order, testify to the predominance in the minds of those who use such expressions of another, and, we may fairly say, a higher form of desire. To have mana is incidentally, no doubt, to be able to procure pigs or yams to a more than ordinary extent. It makes a man master of his material environment according to the degree in which the mysterious power is present. But primarily mana is sought for its own sake, not merely for what it brings. The felt need is for something indwelling, something pertaining to the inner man. Thus we know how the word mana and its derivatives have given birth in the Polynesian dialects to a multitude of phrases expressive of the various activities and states of the soul. 'Feeling,' 'desire,' 'affection,' 'love,' 'belief,' 'memory,' 'thought,' 'the interior of a person,' 'conscience,' 'soul'—all these are attempts on the part of Tregear to translate the native terms into the language of civilization. And the same thought can be shown to be there amongst still humbler folk whose vocabulary is of even more restricted range. Among the Kabi tribe of Queensland the professional healer is said to be manngur—full of vitality. He cures his patient by means of certain sacred stones whereby the vital force is transmitted from his own body to that of the sufferer; and we have it on the strength of a native account that there are always such stones in the doctor's inside, his hand, bones, calves, head and nails alike being full of them. So too, among the Kaitish of Central Australia, when the head-man of the grass-seed totem, in the course of making intichiuma, has been visiting the store-house where the