down in the bed where she lay." Almost universally ghosts, however
impervious to thrust of sword or shot of pistol, can eat and drink like
Squire Westerns. And lastly, we have the grotesque conception of souls
sufficiently material to be killed over again, as in the case of the
negro widows who, wishing to marry a second time, will go and duck
themselves in the pond, in order to drown the souls of their departed
husbands, which are supposed to cling about their necks; while,
according to the Fiji theory, the ghost of every dead warrior must go
through a terrible fight with Samu and his brethren, in which, if he
succeeds, he will enter Paradise, but if he fails he will be killed over
again and finally eaten by the dreaded Samu and his unearthly company.

From the conception of souls embodied in beast-forms, as above
illustrated, it is not a wide step to the conception of beast-souls
which, like human souls, survive the death of the tangible body. The
wide-spread superstitions concerning werewolves and swan-maidens, and
the hardly less general belief in metempsychosis, show that primitive
culture has not arrived at the distinction attained by modern philosophy
between the immortal man and the soulless brute. Still more direct
evidence is furnished by sundry savage customs. The Kafir who has
killed an elephant will cry that he did n't mean to do it, and, lest the
elephant's soul should still seek vengeance, he will cut off and bury
the trunk, so that the mighty beast may go crippled to the spirit-land.
In like manner, the Samoyeds, after shooting a bear, will gather about
the body offering excuses and laying the blame on the Russians; and the
American redskin will even put the pipe of peace into the dead animal's
mouth, and beseech him to forgive the deed. In Assam it is believed that
the ghosts of slain animals will become in the next world the property
of the hunter who kills them; and the Kamtchadales expressly declare
that all animals, even flies and bugs, will live after death,--a belief,
which, in our own day, has been indorsed on philosophical grounds by an
eminent living naturalist. [173] The Greenlanders, too, give evidence
of the same belief by supposing that when after an exhausting fever the
patient comes up in unprecedented health and vigour, it is because he
has lost his former soul and had it replaced by that of a young child
or a reindeer. In a recent work in which the crudest fancies of primeval
savagery ar