is a hole in the ground, the leader stops and looks round at the others, and then presses the palm of his hand down into the interior of the hole, and the others do the same; and after this all is safe and well, as in the former case.  In travelling through the country these holes with numerous impressions of hands in them are to be seen; and you may in one day’s journey pass several of these signs of haunted places, of either or both sorts, within a comparatively short distance of one another.  The hole in which the people put their hands may not have originally existed, and may have been produced by the oft-repeated pressure of hands on the ground as natives passed the haunted spot; but on this point I am unable to make any statement.  Nor have I been able to ascertain what the difference, if any, is, or has been, between the places where they put grass and those in which they merely press the hands.

I found no evidence of any general idea of supernatural powers being possessed by natural inanimate objects, such as rivers or rocks; but, as already stated, fishers are in the habit of addressing the stream in supplication for fish, and it is possible there are other examples of the same sort of thing, which I did not discover.

Magic or sorcery, and those who practise it, and incantations and charms, and those who supply charms, are naturally associated with either ghosts or spirits, or both.  Among the Mafulu people they are, I was assured, associated solely with spirits, and not with ghosts; and, though I have no confirmatory evidence of the accuracy of this statement, I can only in these notes assume that it is correct.  It may well be, however, that in the minds of the people themselves the distinction between the ghost of a person who has lived and died and the spirit which has never lived in visible human form is not really quite clearly defined; or that powers which are now regarded by them as spirits have had an origin, possibly long ago, in what were then believed to be ghosts.  I shall revert to this point at a later stage.

Sorcery.

The Mafulu magic men or sorcerers are different from those of the Mekeo plains.  There is not among the Mafulu, as there is in Mekeo, a large body of powerful professional sorcerers, who are a source of constant terror to the other people of their own villages, and are yet to a certain extent relied upon and desired by those people as a counterpoise to the powers of sorcerers of other villages; and a Mafulu native, unless prevented by a fear of outside hostility in no way connected with the supernatural, will travel alone outside his own community in a way in which fear of the sorcerers would make a Mekeo native unwilling to do so.  The Mafulu sorcerers are a somewhat less powerful people; but they claim, and are supposed to have, certain powers of divination, or actual causation, or both, of certain things.  So far as I could learn, the sorcerer’s supernatural powers would