Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/600

558* while the sculptor, in his primitive form, is one of the agents of this worship.

The tomb and the temple are, as is shown in § 137, developed out of the shelter for the grave—rude and transitory at first, but eventually becoming refined and permanent; while the statue, which is the nucleus of the temple, is an elaborated and finished form of the original effigy placed on the grave. The implication is that, as with the temple so with the statue, the priest, when not himself the executant, as he is among savages, remains always the director of the executant—the man whose in junctions the sculptor carries out.

Of evidence to be set down in support of this general proposition we may begin with that, relatively small in amount, which is furnished by existing uncivilized races.

Concerning the Gold Coast Negroes, Bosman tells us that they "generally build a small cottage or hut. . . on the grave," and also that in some parts "they place several earthen images on the graves." Bastian, writing of the Coast Negroes, says clay figures of departed chiefs with their families are placed in groups under the village tree. Nothing is added about the makers of these clay images; but in another case we find evidence of priestly origin. According to Tuckey, a certain fetich-rock on the Congo "is considered as the peculiar residence of Seembi, the spirit which presides over the river;" that on some of the rocks "are a number of raised figures," made of some composition which appears "like stone sculptured in low relief"—rude representations of men, beasts, ships, etc.: "they were said to be the work of a learned priest of Nokki who taught the art to all those who chose to pay him."

The Polynesian races yield some evidence: relevant facts are narrated of the Sandwich Islanders by Cook and Ellis. The one describes the burying places as containing many wooden images representing their deities, some in huts, others not; and the other tells us that "each celebrated tii [spirit] was honored with an image." That these celebrated spirits were originally the ghosts of deceased chiefs, is implied by the account given of an allied Polynesian race, the New Zealanders. Among these, according to Thomson, the bodies of chiefs, in some cases "interred within the houses where they died," where they were bewailed by relatives for weeks [a rude temple and a rude worship], had "rude human images, twenty or forty feet high," erected as monuments to them. Though in neither of these cases are we told by whom such images of deceased men were made, yet since of New Zealand artists the best are found among the priests, as asserted by