Clanranald is said not to have been dug up, but to have been
found on the moss; it seemed as if the ancestors sent it." There are other
points which make in the same direction. The soul is supposed by various
races to be a little man, an idea which at once links the manes of the
departed with Pigmy people. Thus Dr. Nansen tells us that amongst the
Eskimo a man has many souls. The largest dwell in the larynx and in the
left side, and are tiny men about the size of a sparrow. The other souls
dwell in other parts of the body, and are the size of a finger-joint.[C]
And the Macusi Indians[D] believe that although the body will decay, "the
man in our eyes" will not die, but wander about; an idea which is met with
even in Europe, and which perhaps gives us a clue to the conception of
smallness in size of the shades of the dead. Again, the belief that the
soul lives near the resting-place of its body is widespread, and at least
comparable with, if not equivalent to, the idea that the little people of
Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and India live in the sepulchral mounds or
cromlechs of those countries. Closely connected with this is the idea of
the underground world, peopled by the souls of the departed like the
Abapansi, the widespread nature of which idea is shown by Dr. Tylor. "To
take one example, in which the more limited idea seems to have preceded
the more extensive, the Finns,[E] who feared the ghost of the departed as
unkind, harmful beings, fancied them dwelling with their bodies in the
grave, or else, with what Castren thinks a later philosophy, assigned them
their dwelling in the subterranean Tuonela. Tuonela was like this upper
earth; the sun shone there, there was no lack of land and water, wood and
field, tilth and meadow; there were bears and wolves, snakes and pike, but
all things were of a hurtful, dismal kind; the woods dark and swarming
with wild beasts, the water black, the cornfields bearing seed of snake's
teeth; and there stern, pitiless old Tuoni, and his grim wife and son,
with the hooked fingers with iron points, kept watch and ward over the
dead lest they should escape."

[Footnote A: _Primitive Culture_, i. 388.]

[Footnote B: _Religious System of the Amazulu_, p. 226.]

[Footnote C: Nansen, _ut supra_, p. 227.]

[Footnote D: Tylor, _ut supra_, i. 431.]

[Footnote E: Tylor, _ut supra_, ii. 80.]

It is impossible not to see a connection between such conceptions as these
and the underground habitat