parable loss they
have sustained by his death. We may conjecture that the same train of
thought explains the ancient and widespread custom of hiring
professional mourners to wail over the dead; the tears and lamentations
of his kinsfolk are not enough to soothe the wounded feelings of the
departed, they must be reinforced by noisier expressions of regret.

[Sidenote: Deaths attributed by the Narrinyeri to sorcery.]

But there is another powerful motive for all these violent
demonstrations of grief, into the secret of which we are let by Mr.
Taplin. He says that "all the relatives are careful to be present and
not to be wanting in the proper signs of sorrow, lest they should be
suspected of complicity in causing the death."[173] In fact the
Narrinyeri, like many other savages, attribute all, or most, natural
deaths to sorcery. When a person dies, they think that he or she has
been killed by the evil magic of some ill-wisher, and one of the first
things to be done is to discover the culprit in order that his life may
be taken in revenge. For this purpose the Narrinyeri resort to a form of
divination. On the first night after the death the nearest relation of
the deceased sleeps with his head on the corpse, hoping thus to dream of
the sorcerer who has done the mischief. Next day the corpse is placed on
a sort of bier supported on men's shoulders. The friends of the deceased
gather round and call out the names of suspected persons to see whether
the corpse will give any sign. At last the next of kin calls out the
name of the person of whom he has dreamed, and if at the sound the
corpse makes a movement towards him, which the bearers say they cannot
resist, it is regarded as a clear token that the man so named is the
malefactor. It only remains for the kinsfolk of the dead to hunt down
the culprit and kill him.[174] Thus not only the relations but everybody
in the neighbourhood has the strongest motive for assuming at least an
appearance of sorrow at a death, lest the suspicion of having caused it
by sorcery should fall upon him.

[Sidenote: Pretence made by the Narrinyeri of avenging the death of
their friends on the guilty sorcerer.]

It deserves to be noted, that while the Narrinyeri nominally
acknowledged the duty of killing the sorcerer who in their opinion had
caused the death of their friend, they by no means always discharged the
duty, but sometimes contented themselves with little more than a
pretence of revenge