rom it down to the water for the use of the ghost; and often
they placed food and water on the grave. So far, these measures might be
interpreted as marks of pure and disinterested affection for the soul of
the departed. But such an interpretation is totally excluded by the
ferocious treatment which these savages meted out to the corpse. To
frighten the spirit, lest he should haunt the camp, the father or
brother of the deceased, or the husband, if it was a woman, took a club
and mauled the body with such violence that he often smashed the bones;
further, he generally broke both its legs in order to prevent it from
wandering of nights; and as if that were not enough, he bored holes in
the stomach, the shoulders, and the lungs, and filled the holes with
stones, so that even if the poor ghost should succeed by a desperate
effort in dragging his mangled body out of the grave, he would be so
weighed down by this ballast of stones that he could not get very far.
However, after roaming up and down in this pitiable condition for a time
in their old haunts, the spirits were supposed at last to go up aloft to
the Milky Way.[225] The Kwearriburra tribe, on the Lynd River, in
Queensland, also took forcible measures to prevent the resurrection of
the dead. Whenever a person died, they cut off his or her head, roasted
it in a fire on the grave, and when it was thoroughly charred they
smashed it in bits and left the fragments among the hot coals. They
calculated that when the ghost rose from the grave with the view of
following the tribe, he would miss his head and go groping blindly about
for it till he scorched himself in the embers of the fire and was glad
to shrink back into his narrow bed.[226]

Thus even among those Australian tribes which have progressed furthest
in the direction of religion, such approaches as they have made towards
a worship of the dead appear to be determined far more by fear than by
affection and reverence. And we are told that it is the nearest
relations and the most influential men whose ghosts are most
dreaded.[227]

[Sidenote: Cuttings and brandings of the flesh of the living in honour
of the dead.]

There is another custom observed by the Australian aborigines in
mourning which deserves to be mentioned. We all know that the Israelites
were forbidden to make cuttings in their flesh for the dead.[228] The
custom was probably practised by the heathen Canaanites, as it has been
by savages in various pa