and necessity of Death.  He is an intruder brought by magic arts into our living world.  Again, in his Ethnology of Bengal (pp. 199, 200), Dalton tells us that the Hos (an aboriginal non-Aryan race) are of the same opinion as the Puwarrees.  ’They hold that all disease in men or animals is attributable to one of two causes:  the wrath of some evil spirit or the spell of some witch or sorcerer.  These superstitions are common to all classes of the population of this province.’  In the New Hebrides disease and death are caused, as Mr. Codrington found, by tamates, or ghosts. {179} In New Caledonia, according to Erskine, death is the result of witchcraft practised by members of a hostile tribe, for who would be so wicked as to bewitch his fellow-tribesman?  The Andaman Islanders attribute all natural deaths to the supernatural influence of e rem chaugala, or to jurn-win, two spirits of the jungle and the sea.  The death is avenged by the nearest relation of the deceased, who shoots arrows at the invisible enemy.  The negroes of Central Africa entertain precisely similar ideas about the non-naturalness of death.  Mr. Duff Macdonald, in Africana, writes:  ’Every man who dies what we call a natural death is really killed by witches.’  It is a far cry from the Blantyre Mission in Africa to the Eskimo of the frozen North; but so uniform is human nature in the lower races that the Eskimo precisely agree, as far as theories of death go, with the Africans, the aborigines of India, the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the rest.  Dr. Rink {180a} found that ’sickness or death coming about in an accidental manner was always attributed to witchcraft, and it remains a question whether death on the whole was not originally accounted for as resulting from magic.’  Pere Paul le Jeune, writing from Quebec in 1637, says of the Red Men:  ‘Je n’en voy mourir quasi aucun, qui ne pense estre ensorcele.’ {180b} It is needless to show how these ideas survived into civilisation.  Bishop Jewell, denouncing witches before Queen Elizabeth, was, so far, mentally on a level with the Eskimo and the Australian.  The familiar and voluminous records of trials for witchcraft, whether at Salem or at Edinburgh, prove that all abnormal and unwonted deaths and diseases, in animals or in men, were explained by our ancestors as the results of supernatural mischief.

It has been made plain (and the proof might be enlarged to any extent) that the savage does not regard death as ‘God’s great ordinance,’ universal and inevitable and natural.  But, being curious and inquisitive, he cannot help asking himself, ’How did this terrible invader first enter a world where he now appears so often?’ This is, properly speaking, a scientific question; but the savage answers it, not by collecting facts and generalising from them, but by inventing a myth.  That is his invariable habit.  Does he want to know why this tree has red berries, why that animal has brown stripes, why