Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/57

 071 the Belief m a Futiwe State. 47

abandon not only the dead, but the moribund. The Yakut provides a funeral feast at which the person most con- cerned actually participates ; being thereupon left in the grave to perish.^ The Hottentot, however, makes a shelter about his dying fellow, props him up in a crouching attitude, and leaves him with a few provisions and with apologies for thus deserting him.^

Here, then, is room for speculation as well as for further research. If we argue from the examples of such lowly types, it is conceivable that, at the nomadic stage which seems to have marked the childhood of the race, the dying man was abandoned with food, water, and a gift of precious fire, even perhaps with his simple weapons and implements.^ Afterwards, as sedentary conditions came to prevail, the more decent habit of burying the dead might come about, while the old usage hardened into the custom of placing these accessories in the grave with the corpse.

Next in order of simplicity comes the usage of keeping the dead in the dwelling, as is done in many parts of the Pacific ; while the Central African chooses the earthen floor of his dwelling for the shallow grave of his dead.* From this pious method the next advance is the abandon- ment to the recently departed of the hut with its contagion of death, the living proceeding to build a new dwelling for their own use. Sometimes the whole village is deserted. Among the Bathonga a new village must be built as soon as possible after the death of the headman.-^ A less

Revue dcs His lot res des Religions, xlvi. 1 902, p. 212.
 * M. A. Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, Oxford, 1914, p. 161. See also

^Thunberg, Travels, London, 1795-6, vol. ii. p. 194.

^See also Dudley Kidd, The Essential Ka§ii, London, 1904, p. 247 sqq. ; Hewitt, Amative Tribes of S.E. Australia, p. 467 ; G. Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, London, 1884, p. 335 sqq.

^Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, London, 1902, p. 554. Siberia, ^L A. Czaplicka, (Oxford, 1914, p. 144.
 * Junod, IJfe of a S. African Tribe, vol. i. p. 289. See also Aboriginal