Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/141

Rh give a power of iron resistance. The Red Indian hunter wears ornaments of the claws of the grizzly bear, that he may be endowed with its courage and ferocity, a simpler charm than that whereby the magicians made men invincible in Pliny's time, in which the head and tail of a dragon, marrow of a lion and hair from his forehead, foam of a victorious racehorse, and claws of a dog, were bound together in a piece of deerskin, with alternate sinews of a deer and a gazelle. The Tyrolese hunter still wears tufts of eagle's down in his hat, to gain the eagle's keen sight and courage. Many of the food prejudices of savage races depend on the belief which belongs to this class of superstitions, that the qualities of the eaten pass into the eater. Thus, among the Dayaks, young men sometimes abstain from the flesh of deer, lest it should make them timid, and before a pig-hunt they avoid oil, lest the game should slip through their fingers, and in the same way the flesh of slow-going and cowardly animals is not to be eaten by the warriors of South America; but they love the meat of tigers, stags, and boars, for courage and speed. An English merchant in Shanghai, at the time of the Taeping attack, met his Chinese servant carrying home a heart, and asked him what he had got there. He said it was the heart of a rebel, and that he was going to take it home and eat it to make him brave. The very same thing is recorded in Ashanti, where the chiefs ate the heart of Sir Charles M'Carthy, to obtain his courage.

When a Maori war-party is to start, the priests set up sticks in the ground to represent the warriors, and he whose stick is blown down is to fall in the battle. In the Fiji Islands, the diviner will shake a bunch of dry cocoa-nuts to see whether a sick child will die; if all fall off, it will recover; if any remain on, it will die. He will spin a cocoa-nut, and decide a question according to where the eye of the nut looks towards when at rest again, or he will sit on the ground and take omens from his legs; if the right leg trembles first, it is good; if the left, it is evil; or