Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/18

4 phenomena of atavism. In North-West America, among the Koloshes, the mother sees in a dream the deceased relative whose transmitted soul will give his likeness to the child; and in Vancouver's Island in 1860 a lad was much regarded by the Indians because he had a mark like the scar of a gun-shot wound on his hip, it being believed that a chief dead some four generations before, who had such a mark, had returned. In Old Calabar, if a mother loses a child, and another is born soon after, she thinks the departed one to have come back. The Wanika consider that the soul of a dead ancestor animates a child, and this is why it resembles its father or mother; in Guinea a child bearing a strong resemblance, physical or mental, to a dead relative, is supposed to have inherited his soul; and the Yorubas, greeting a new-born infant with the salutation, 'Thou art come!' look for signs to show what ancestral soul has returned among them. Among the Khonds of Orissa, births are celebrated by a feast on the seventh day, and the priest, divining by dropping rice-grains in a cup of water, and judging from observations made on the person of the infant, determines which of his progenitors has reappeared, and the child generally at least among the northern tribes receives the name of that ancestor. In Europe the Lapps repeat an instructive animistic idea just noticed in America; the future mother was told in a dream what name to give her child, this message being usually given by the very spirit of the deceased ancestor, who was about to be incarnate in her. Among the lower races generally the