their salutations, his greeting in reply, being all regulated with the utmost nicety.  He can only wear a special garb.  He must never cut his hair.  His nails must be suffered to grow long.  And so on and so forth.  Such disabilities, indeed, are wont to circumscribe the life of all sacred persons, and can be matched from every part of the world.  But they may fairly be cited here, as helping to fill in the picture of what I have called the precautionary or negative type of religious ritual.

Further, there is something rotten in the state of Toda religion.  The dairymen struck Dr. Rivers as very slovenly in the performance of their duties, as well as vague and inaccurate in their accounts of what ought to be done.  Indeed, it was hard to find persons willing to undertake the office.  Ritual duties involving uncomfortable taboos were apt to be thrust on youngsters.  The youngsters, being youngsters, would probably violate the taboos; but anyway that was their look-out.  From evasions to fictions is but a step.  Hence when an unclean person approached the dairyman, the latter would simply pretend not to see him.  Or the rule that he must not enter a hut, if women were within, would be circumvented by simply removing from the dwelling the three emblems of womanhood, the pounder, the sieve, and the sweeper; whereupon his “face was saved.”  Now wherefore all this lack of earnestness?  Dr. Rivers thinks that too much ritual was the reason.  I agree; but would venture to add, “too much negative ritual.”  A religion that is all dodging must produce a sneaking kind of worshipper.

Now let us turn another type of primitive religion that is equally identified with the food-quest, but allied to its positive and active functions, which it seeks to help out.  Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have given us a most minute account of certain ceremonies of the Arunta, a people of central Australia.  These ceremonies they have named Intichiuma, and the name will probably stick, though there is reason to believe that the native word for them is really something different.  Their purpose is to make the food-animals and food-plants multiply and prosper.  Each animal or plant is attended to by the group that has it for a totem. (Totemism amongst this very remarkable people has nothing to do either with exogamy or with lineage; but that is a subject into which it is impossible to go here.) The rites vary considerably from totem to totem, but a typical case or two may be cited.

The witchetty-grub men, for instance, want the grubs to multiply, that there may be plenty for their fellows to eat.  So they wend their way along a certain path which tradition declares to have been traversed by the great leader of the witchetty-grubs of the days of long ago.  (These were grubs transformed into men, who became by reincarnation ancestors of the present totemites.) The path brings them to a place in the hills where there is a big stone surrounded by many small stones.  The big stone is the adult animal, the little stones are its eggs.  So first they tap the big stone, chanting an invitation to it to lay eggs.  Then the master of the ceremonies rubs the stomach of each totemite with the little stones, and says, “You have eaten much food.”