ds its uses in the rest of the world, it may be said at once
that here and there, in Galicia in Europe, in the Malay Peninsula in
Asia, and amongst the Bushmen in Africa, it is used to drive or scare
animals, whether tame or wild. And this, to make a mere guess, may
have been its earliest use, if utilitarian contrivances can generally
claim historical precedence, as is by no means certain. As long as
man hunted with very inferior weapons, he must have depended a good
deal on drives, that either forced the game into a pitfall, or rounded
them up so as to enable a concerted attack to be made by the human
pack. No wonder that the bull-roarer is sometimes used to bring luck
in a mystic way to hunters. More commonly, however, at the present
day, the bull-roarer serves another type of mystic purpose, its noise,
which is so suggestive of thunder or wind, with a superadded touch
of weirdness and general mystery, fitting it to play a leading part
in rain-making ceremonies. From these not improbably have developed
all sorts of other ceremonies connected with making vegetation and
the crops grow, and with making the boys grow into men, as is done
at the initiation rites. It is not surprising, therefore, to find a
carved human face appearing on the bull-roarer in New Guinea, and again
away in North America, whilst in West Africa it is held to contain
the voice of a very god. In Australia, too, all their higher notions
about a benevolent deity and about religious matters in general seem
to concentrate on this strange symbol, outwardly the frailest of toys,
yet to the spiritual eye of these simple folk a veritable holy of
holies.

And now for the merest sketch of its distribution, the details of which
are to be learnt from Dr. Haddon's valuable paper in _The Study of
Man_. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have it. It can be tracked
along central Europe through Switzerland, Germany, and Poland beyond
the Carpathians, whereupon ancient Greece with its Dionysiac mysteries
takes up the tale. In America it is found amongst the Eskimo, is
scattered over the northern part of the continent down to the Mexican
frontier, and then turns up afresh in central Brazil. Again, from the
Malay Peninsula and Sumatra it extends over the great fan of darker
peoples, from Africa, west and south, to New Guinea, Melanesia, and
Australia, together with New Zealand alone of Polynesian islands--a
fact possibly showing it to have belonged to some earlier ra