Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/458

450 II. In the second place, the flesh of the hare is, or was very generally tabooed. Among the many widely-separated peoples with whom this taboo occurs may be mentioned the following: Jews, Chinese, Lapps, Hottentots, Greenlanders, Somal Arabs and Shiya'ees, Namaquas, Welsh, Germans, Bretons, British. The inhabitants of the Swiss lake dwellings, and of the Danish shell mounds, also appear to have abstained from eating this animal. In India hare's meat was specially permitted by the laws of Manu ; it appears from a passage in the Kalevala to have been eaten by the ancient Finns, and it has of course been generally consumed by the more advanced nations of Europe. In some cases, however, even when it is eaten, a special religious or civic virtue, derived apparently from old sacrificial usage, is still attached to it. Thus, the celebrated "black broth" of the Spartans was made of the blood and bowels of a hare, and in Ireland it was an old and peculiar privilege of the kings of Tara to be fed upon "the hares of Naas", a diet which probably owed its origin to religious ritual.

It may also be noticed that peoples who do not eat the hare are quite unable to account for their conduct. The taboo has been handed down from dark primæval times, and is explained by some fable obviously modern, and often absurd. Thus the Jews gave a reason which any observer