d into animals and plants. Such animals
are, for example, the white ants and a rare kind of wild pig, which is
said not to allow itself to be killed. Such a tree, for example, is the
_barimbar_. That, apparently, is the whole religion of the Monumbo. Yet
they are ghost-seers of the most arrant sort. An anxious superstitious
fear pursues them at every step. Superstitious views are the motives
that determine almost everything that they do or leave undone."[381]
Their dread of ghosts is displayed in their custom of doing no work in
the plantations for three days after a death, lest the ghost, touched to
the quick by their heartless indifference, should send wild boars to
ravage the plantations. And when a man has slain an enemy in war, he has
to remain a long time secluded in the men's clubhouse, touching nobody,
not even his wife and children, while the villagers celebrate his
victory with song and dance. He is believed to be in a state of
ceremonial impurity (_bolobolo_) such that, if he were to touch his wife
and children, they would be covered with sores. At the end of his
seclusion he is purified by washings and other purgations and is clean
once more.[382] The reason of this uncleanness of a victorious warrior
is not mentioned, but analogy makes it nearly certain that it is a dread
of the vengeful ghost of the man whom he has slain. A similar fear
probably underlies the rule that a widower must abstain from certain
foods, such as fish and sauces, and from bathing for a certain time
after the death of his wife.[383]

[Sidenote: The Tamos of Astrolabe Bay. Mistake of attempting to combine
descriptive with comparative anthropology.]

Leaving Potsdam Harbour and the Monumbo, and moving still eastward along
the coast of German New Guinea, we come to a large indentation known as
Astrolabe Bay. The natives of this part of the coast call themselves
Tamos. The largest village on the bay bears the name of Bogadyim and in
1894 numbered about three hundred inhabitants.[384] Our principal
authority on the natives is a German ethnologist, Dr. B. Hagen, who
spent about eighteen months at Stefansort on Astrolabe Bay.
Unfortunately he has mixed up his personal observations of these
particular people not merely with second-hand accounts of natives of
other parts of New Guinea but with discussions of general theories of
the origin and migrations of races and of the development of social
institutions; so that it is not altogether easy