Page:The Melanesians Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore.djvu/331

] a foot long, the fore-shaft eight inches, the reed-shaft twenty inches. The one is a heavy and powerful weapon, requiring a large and powerful bow; the other is slight and weak, little more than a human hone fitted for the bow; one is poisoned, the other is not; both are in native estimation equally deadly. Some of the New Hebrides and Solomon Island arrows have a very small point of bone. It is the human bone first of all that in native opinion gives the arrow its efficacy; the bone of any dead man will do, because any ghost has mana to work on the wounded man; but the bone of a man who was powerful when alive is more valued.

Though it is the human bone that gives in the first place the deadly quality to the arrow, yet the bone must be fitted into the shaft with the magic charms which secure super-natural power to the weapon. The maker sings or mutters charms as he ties the bone to the foreshaft; hence, as I have been told, the mana is put in where the bone joins the foreshaft. These charms are known but to a few whose business it is to make the arrows; but still if one should, as did the young man at Omba who made arrows of his brother's bones, take the bones of one he knew in life and call upon his ghost, as he would be sure to do, in binding on the head, no doubt his arrows would be perfectly well prepared. The 'poison,' again, is an addition to the power of the bone; the magical efficacy of this preparation is added to the supernatural power residing in the dead man's bone. When the bone had made the wound, the dead man's power, which had been brought by incantations to the arrow, would make the wound fatal. The preparation of burning juices mixed with charms, and smeared