Page:The Native Tribes of South Australia (1879).djvu/126

 64 DEMONS. ngaitye, so they killed them all; and on cutting the mother open afterwards found seven more young snakes inside of her, making twenty-three, in all, produced at one litter. One day a couple of wild dogs came on a predatory expedition into my neighbourhood, so I shot one of them; and immediately after was reproached very much for hurting the ngaitye of two or three blacks residing here. People are sometimes named from their ngaitye; as, for instance, Taowinyeri, the person whose ngaitye is Taow, the native name of the guana. It appears to me that the ngaitye of the Narrinyeri is the same as the aitu of the Samoans, hut it is not regarded with so much veneration by the former as by the latter. The names are evidently derived from the same original, ngaitye being the same word as aitu, only with the addition of consonants. The following is Dr. G. Turner’s account of the Samoan aitu:  "These gods were supposed to appear in some visible incarnation, and the particular thing in which his god was in the habit of appearing was to the Samoan, an object of veneration. It was, in fast, his idol, and he was careful never to injure it or treat it with contempt. One, for instance, saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard; and so on throughout all the fish of the sea, and birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. In some of the shellfish, even, gods were supposed to be present. A man would eat freely of the incarnation of the god of another man, but the incarnation of his own particular god he would consider it death to injure or eat. The god was supposed to avenge the insult by taking up his abode in that person’s body, and causing to generate there the very thing which he had eaten, until it produced death. These gods they called aitu feile, or gods of the house." The Narrinyeri believe in the power of the dead to influence the elements, of which I once had a proof. A short time after the execution of the murderers of Mrs. Rainberd, we had a gale of wind for several days successively. Upon my remarking upon