Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/694

674 the Australians, Tasmanians, and Abipones, if the name of a deceased person happened to be a common name—e. g., the name of an animal, or plant—this name was abolished, and a new one substituted for it. During the residence of the Jesuit missionary Dobritzhoffer among the Abipones, the name for tiger was thus changed three times. Among the Indians of Columbia near relatives of a deceased person often change their names, under the impression that the ghost will return if he hears the familiar names.

I must pass lightly over the kindlier modes of barring the dead by providing for the personal comforts of the poor ghost in his long home. One instance, however, of the minute care with which the survivors will provide for the wants of the dead, in order that he may have no possible excuse for returning, I can not refrain from mentioning. In the German district of Voigtland, with its inclement sky, they never forget to place in the coffin an umbrella and a pair of goloshes. Whether these utensils are intended for use in heaven, or elsewhere, is a question which I must leave to theologians.

A pathetic example is afforded by some Indian tribes of New Mexico, who drop milk from the mother's breast on the lips of her dead babe.

The nearly universal practice of leaving food on the tomb, or of actually passing it into the grave by means of an aperture or tube, is too well known to need illustration. Like the habit of dressing the dead or dying in his best clothes, it probably originated in the selfish but not unkindly desire to induce the perturbed spirit to rest in the grave, and not come plaguing the survivors for food and raiment.

Merely mentioning the customs of building a little house for the accommodation of the soul either on the grave or on the way to it, and of leaving straw on the road, in the hope that the weary ghost would sit down on it and never get as far as the house, I now come to two modes of barring the ghost, which from their importance I have reserved to the last I mean the methods of barring the ghost by fire and water.

First, by fire. After a funeral certain heathen Siberians, who greatly fear the dead, seek to get rid of the ghost of the departed by leaping over a fire. Similarly at Rome, mourners returning from a