the gift of second-sight and magical practices,
can detect crimes, so that they necessarily become a kind of civil
magistrates. These Angekkok or Angakut have familiar spirits called
Torngak, a word connected with the name of their chief spiritual being,
Torngarsak. The Torngak is commonly the ghost of a deceased parent of
the sorcerer. "These men," says Egede, "are held in great honour and
esteem among this stupid and ignorant nation, insomuch that nobody dare
ever refuse the strictest obedience when they command him in the name of
Torngarsak." The importance and actual existence of belief in magic
has thus been attested by the evidence of institutions, even among
Australians, Fuegians and Eskimos.

It is now necessary to pass from examples of tribes who have
superstitious respect for certain individuals, but who have no property
and no chiefs, to peoples who exhibit the phenomenon of superstitious
reverence attached to wealthy rulers or to judges. To take the example
of Ireland, as described in the Senchus Mor, we learn that the chiefs,
just like the Angakut of the Eskimos, had "power to make fair or foul
weather" in the literal sense of the words.(1) In Africa, in the same
way, as Bosman, the old traveller, says, "As to what difference there
is between one negro and another, the richest man is the most honoured,"
yet the most honoured man has the same magical power as the poor
Angakuts of the Eskimos.

(1) Early History of Institutions, p. 195.

"In the Solomon Islands," says Dr. Codrington, "there is nothing to
prevent a common man from becoming a chief, if he can show that he has
the mana (supernatural power) for it."(1)

(1) Journ. Anth. Inst., x. iii. 287, 300, 309.

Though it is anticipating a later stage of this inquiry, we must here
observe that the sacredness, and even the magical virtues of barbarous
chiefs seem to have descended to the early leaders of European races.
The children of Odin and of Zeus were "sacred kings". The Homeric
chiefs, like those of the Zulus and the Red Men, and of the early Irish
and Swedes, exercised an influence over the physical universe. Homer(1)
speaks of "a blameless king, one that fears the gods, and reigns among
many men and mighty, and the black earth bears wheat and barley, and the
sheep bring forth and fail not, and the sea gives store of fish, and all
out of his good sovereignty".

(1) Od., xix. 109.

The attributes usually assigned by barbarous peopl