of the individual to decide how he will make it.
With most natives it is a simple matter of business, the throwing of a
sprat to catch a salmon; the man brings his offering only when he needs
the help of the spirits. There is very little ceremony about it. The
offerer will say, for example, 'There, I lay a cigar for you; smoke it
and hereafter drive fish towards me'; or, 'Accompany me on the journey,
and see to it that I do good business.' The place where the food is
presented is the shelf for pots and dishes under the roof. Thus they
imagine that the spirits exert a tolerably far-reaching influence over
all created things, and it is their notion that the spirits take
possession of the objects. In like manner the spirits can injure a man
by thwarting his plans, for example, by frightening away the fish,
blighting the fruits of the fields, and so forth. If the native is
forced to conclude that the spirits are against him, he has no
hesitation about deceiving them in the grossest manner. Should the
requisite sacrifices be inconvenient to him, he flatly refuses them, or
gives the shabbiest things he can find. In all this the native displays
the same craft and cunning which he is apt to practise in his dealings
with the whites. He fears the power which the spirit has over him, yet
he tries whether he cannot outwit the spirit like an arrant
block-head."[477]

[Sidenote: Crude motives for sacrifice.]

This account of the crude but quite intelligible motives which lead
these savages to sacrifice to the spirits of their dead may be commended
to the attention of writers on the history of religion who read into
primitive sacrifice certain subtle and complex ideas which it never
entered into the mind of primitive man to conceive and which, even if
they were explained to him, he would in all probability be totally
unable to understand.

[Sidenote: Lamboam, the land of the dead.]

According to the Tami, the souls of the dead live in the nether world.
The spirit-land is called Lamboam; the entrance to it is by a cleft in a
rock. The natives of the mainland also call Hades by the name of
Lamboam; but whereas according to them every village has its own little
Lamboam, the Tami hold that there is only one big Lamboam for everybody,
though it is subdivided into many mansions, of which every village has
one to itself. In Lamboam everything is fairer and more perfect than on
earth. The fruits are so plentiful that the blessed spirits