The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar is a toy familiar to English country lads.  They call it the bull-roarer.  The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which anyone can make.  I do not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons.  In the first place, it produces a most horrible and unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders it detested by persons of mature age.  In the second place, the character of the toy is such that it will almost infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it is used, and will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants.  Having thus, I trust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the interests of science) to show how the toy is made.  Nothing can be less elaborate.  You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the ends.  When finished, the toy may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a ‘fish’ used as a counter (that is how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor.  Then tie a strong piece of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood and the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun, and the Greeks called it [Greek]) is complete.  Now twist the end of the string tightly about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round.  For a few moments nothing will happen.  In a very interesting lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a bull-roarer.  At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like those chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace.  But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name, producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if some supernatural being ’fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful roar.’  Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.

The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most extraordinary history.  To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in folklore.  The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and civilised mysteries.  There are students who would found on this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend from the same stock.  But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere.  There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object.