ith 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.

The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in
many and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred
instrument, employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in
Australia, in New Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as
we have seen, it is a peasant boy's plaything in England. A number of
questions are naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it a thing
invented once for all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering
races, or handed on from one people and tribe to another? Or is the
bull-roarer a toy that might be accidentally hit on in any country
where men can sharpen wood and twist the sinews of animals into
string? Was the thing originally a toy, and is its religious and
mystical nature later; or was it originally one of the properties of
the priest, or medicine-man, which in England has dwindled to a
plaything? Lastly, was this mystical instrument at first employed in
the rites of a civilised people like the Greeks, and was it in some
way borrowed or inherited by South Africans, Australians, and New
Mexicans? Or is it a mere savage invention, surviving (like certain
other features of the Greek mysteries) from a distant state of
savagery? Our answer to all these questions is that in all probability
the presence of the ~rhombos~, or bull-roarer, in Greek mysteries was
a survival from the time when Greeks were in the social condition of
Australians.

In the first place the bull-roarer is associat