eam or drink from it,
except at one pool, which for the sake of convenience was considered not
to be sacred. Again, in Bugotu, a district of Ysabel, which is another
of the Solomon Islands, there is a pool known to be the haunt of a very
old ghost. When a man has an enemy whom he wishes to harm he will obtain
some scraps of his food and throw them into the water. If the food is at
once devoured by the fish, which swarm in the pool, the man will die,
but otherwise his life may be saved by the intervention of a man who
knows the habits of the ghost and how to propitiate him. In these sacred
places there are stones, on which people place food in order to obtain
good crops, while for success in fishing they deposit morsels of cooked
fish. Such stones are treated with reverence and seem to be in a fair
way to develop into altars. However, when the old ghost is superseded,
as he often is, by younger rivals, the development of an altar out of
the stones is arrested.[609]

[Sidenote: Ghosts in animals, such as sharks, alligators, snakes,
bonitos, and frigate-birds.]

From some of these instances we learn that Melanesian ghosts can
sometimes take up their abode in animals, such as cuscuses, eels, and
fish. The creatures which are oftenest used as vehicles by the spirits
of the dead are sharks, alligators, snakes, bonitos, and frigate-birds.
Snakes which haunt a sacred place are themselves sacred, because they
belong to or actually embody the ghost. Sharks, again, in all these
islands are very often thought to be the abode of ghosts; for men before
their death will announce that they will appear as sharks, and
afterwards any shark remarkable for size or colour which haunts a
certain shore or coast is taken to be somebody's ghost and receives the
name of the deceased. At Saa certain food, such as coco-nuts from
particular trees, is reserved to feed such a ghost-shark; and men of
whom it is known for certain that they will be sharks after their death
are allowed to anticipate the posthumous honours which await them by
devouring such food in the sacred place, just as if they were real
sharks. Sharks are very commonly believed to be the abode of ghosts in
Florida and Ysabel, and in Savo, where they are particularly numerous;
hence, though all sharks are not venerated, there is no living creature
so commonly held sacred by the Central Melanesians as a shark; and
shark-ghosts seem even to form a class of powerful supernatural beings.