Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/148

138 the human race. There is one musical instrument (if the name may be allowed to it) which we give over to young children, who indeed thoroughly appreciate and enjoy it,—the rattle.

When the dignity of manhood is to be conferred on a Siamese prince by cutting his hair and giving him a new dress, they shake a rattle before him as he goes, to show that till the ceremony is performed, he is still a child. As if to keep us continually in mind of his place in history, the savage magician clings with wonderful pertinacity to the same instrument. It is a bunch of hoofs tied together, a blown bladder with peas in it, or, more often than anything else, a calabash with stones or shells or bones inside. It is his great instrument in curing the sick, the accompaniment of his medicine-songs, and the symbol of his profession, among the Red Indians, among the South American tribes, and in Africa. For the magician's work, it holds its own against far higher instruments, the whistles and pipes of the American, and even the comparatively high-class flutes, harmonicons, and stringed instruments of the negro. Next above the rattle in the scale of musical instruments is the drum, and it too has been to a great extent adopted by the sorcerer, and, often painted with magic figures; it is an important implement to him in Lapland, in Siberia, among some North American and some South American tribes. The clinging together of savage sorcery with these childish instruments, is in full consistency with the theory that both belong to the infancy of mankind. With less truth to nature and history, the modern spirit-rapper, though his bringing up the spirits of the dead by doing hocus-pocus under a table or in a dark room is so like the proceedings of the African mganga or the Red Indian