Melanesia (Fiji) (_continued_)

Indifference of the Fijians to death, p. 419; their custom of killing
the sick and aged with the consent of the victims, 419-424; their
readiness to die partly an effect of their belief in immortality, 422
_sq._; wives strangled or buried alive to accompany their husbands to
the spirit land, 424-426; servants and dependants killed to attend their
dead lords, 426; sacrifices of foreskins and fingers in honour of dead
chiefs, 426 _sq._; boys circumcised in order to save the lives of their
fathers or fathers' brothers, 427; saturnalia attending such rites of
circumcision, 427 _sq._; the _Nanga_, or sacred enclosure of stones,
dedicated to the worship of ancestors, 428 _sq._; first-fruits of the
yams offered to the ancestors in the _Nanga_, 429; initiation of young
men in the _Nanga_, drama of death and resurrection, sacrament of food
and water, 429-432; the initiation followed by a period of sexual
licence, 433; the initiatory rites apparently intended to introduce the
novices to the ancestral spirits and endow them with the powers of the
dead, 434 _sq._; the rites seem to have been imported into Fiji by
immigrants from the west, 435 _sq._; the licence attending these rites
perhaps a reversion to primitive communism for the purpose of
propitiating the ancestral spirits, 436 _sq._; description of the
_Nanga_ or sacred enclosure of stones, 437 _sq._; comparison with the
cromlechs and other megalithic monuments of Europe, 438.

Lecture XX.--The Belief in Immortality among the Natives of Eastern
Melanesia (Fiji) (_concluded_)

Worship of parents and other dead relations in Fiji, pp. 439 _sq._;
Fijian notion of divinity (_kalou_), 440; two classes of gods, namely,
divine gods and human gods or deified men, 440 _sq._; temples (_bures_)
441 _sq._; worship at the temples, 443; priests (_betes_), their
oracular inspiration by the gods, 443-446; human sacrifices on various
occasions, such as building a house or launching a new canoe, 446 _sq._;
high estimation in which manslaughter was held by the Fijians, 447
_sq._; consecration of manslayers and restrictions laid on them,
probably from fear of the ghosts of their victims, 448 _sq._; certain
funeral customs based apparently on the fear of ghosts, 450 _sqq._;
persons who have handled a corpse forbidden to touch food with their
hands, 450 _sq._; seclusion of gravediggers, 451; mutilations,
brandings, and fasts in honour of the dead, 451 _sq._; the