r us to realize. A boy with us passes very gradually from childhood to
manhood, there is no definite moment when he suddenly emerges as a man.
Little by little as his education advances he is admitted to the social
privileges of the circle in which he is born. He goes to school, enters
a workshop or a university, and finally adopts a trade or a profession.
In the case of girls, in whose upbringing primitive savagery is apt to
linger, there is still, in certain social strata a ceremony known as
Coming Out. A girl's dress is suddenly lengthened, her hair is put up,
she is allowed to wear jewels, she kisses her sovereign's hand, a dance
is given in her honour; abruptly, from her seclusion in the cocoon state
of the schoolroom, she emerges full-blown into society. But the custom,
with its half-realized savagery, is already dying, and with boys it does
not obtain at all. Both sexes share, of course, the religious rite of
Confirmation.

To avoid harsh distinctions, to bridge over abrupt transitions, is
always a mark of advancing civilization; but the savage, in his
ignorance and fear, lamentably over-stresses distinctions and
transitions. The long process of education, of passing from child to
man, is with him condensed into a few days, weeks, or sometimes months
of tremendous educational emphasis--of what is called "initiation,"
"going in," that is, entering the tribe. The ceremonies vary, but the
gist is always substantially the same. The boy is to put away childish
things, and become a grown and competent tribesman. Above all he is to
cease to be a woman-thing and become a man. His initiation prepares him
for his two chief functions as a tribesman--to be a warrior, to be a
father. That to the savage is the main if not the whole Duty of Man.

This "initiation" is of tremendous importance, and we should expect,
what in fact we find, that all this emotion that centres about it issues
in _dromena_, "rites done." These rites are very various, but they all
point one moral, that the former things are passed away and that the
new-born man has entered on a new life.

Simplest perhaps of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised by
the Kikuyu of British East Africa,[30] who require that every boy, just
before circumcision, must be born again. "The mother stands up with the
boy crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labour
pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed."

More often th