a pregnant woman's
breast-cloth and will burn it and eat the ashes, thinking thereby to
transfer the pregnant woman's quality of fertility to herself. When
a Hindu widow is remarried her clothes and ornaments are sometimes
buried on the boundary of her second husband's village and she puts
on new clothes, because it is thought that her first husband's spirit
will remain in the old clothes and give trouble.

62. The recurrence of events.

A brief digression may be made here in order to suggest an explanation
of another important class of primitive ideas. These arise from the
belief that when something has happened, that same event, or some
other resembling it, will again occur, or, more briefly, the belief
in the recurrence of events. This view is the origin of a large class
of omens, and appears to have been originally evolved simply from the
recurring phenomena of day and night and of the months and climatic
seasons. For suppose that one was in the position of primitive man,
knowing absolutely nothing of the nature and constitution of the earth
and the heavenly bodies, or of the most elementary facts of astronomy;
then, if the question were asked why one expected the sun to rise
to-morrow, the only possible answer, and the answer which one would
give, would be because it had risen to-day and every day as long as one
could remember. The reason so stated might have no scientific value,
but would at any rate establish a strong general probability. But
primitive man could not have given it in this form, because he had no
memory and could not count. Even now comparatively advanced tribes like
the Gonds have a hopelessly inaccurate memory for ordinary incidents;
and, as suggested subsequently, the faculty of memory was probably
acquired very slowly with the development of language. And since he
could not count, the continuous recurrence of natural phenomena had
no cumulative force with him, so that he might distinguish them from
other events. His argument was thus simply "the sun will rise again
because it rose before; the moon will wax and wane again because she
waxed and waned before"; grass and leaves and fruit would grow again
because they did so before; the animals which gave him food would come
again as before; and so on. But these were the only events which his
brain retained at all, and that only because his existence depended
upon them and they continually recurred. The ordinary incidents of life
which prese