und, by tamates, or
ghosts. {179} In New Caledonia, according to Erskine, death is the
result of witchcraft practised by members of a hostile tribe, for who
would be so wicked as to bewitch his fellow-tribesman? The Andaman
Islanders attribute all natural deaths to the supernatural influence of e
rem chaugala, or to jurn-win, two spirits of the jungle and the sea. The
death is avenged by the nearest relation of the deceased, who shoots
arrows at the invisible enemy. The negroes of Central Africa entertain
precisely similar ideas about the non-naturalness of death. Mr. Duff
Macdonald, in Africana, writes: 'Every man who dies what we call a
natural death is really killed by witches.' It is a far cry from the
Blantyre Mission in Africa to the Eskimo of the frozen North; but so
uniform is human nature in the lower races that the Eskimo precisely
agree, as far as theories of death go, with the Africans, the aborigines
of India, the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the rest. Dr. Rink
{180a} found that 'sickness or death coming about in an accidental manner
was always attributed to witchcraft, and it remains a question whether
death on the whole was not originally accounted for as resulting from
magic.' Pere Paul le Jeune, writing from Quebec in 1637, says of the Red
Men: 'Je n'en voy mourir quasi aucun, qui ne pense estre ensorcele.'
{180b} It is needless to show how these ideas survived into
civilisation. Bishop Jewell, denouncing witches before Queen Elizabeth,
was, so far, mentally on a level with the Eskimo and the Australian. The
familiar and voluminous records of trials for witchcraft, whether at
Salem or at Edinburgh, prove that all abnormal and unwonted deaths and
diseases, in animals or in men, were explained by our ancestors as the
results of supernatural mischief.

It has been made plain (and the proof might be enlarged to any extent)
that the savage does not regard death as 'God's great ordinance,'
universal and inevitable and natural. But, being curious and
inquisitive, he cannot help asking himself, 'How did this terrible
invader first enter a world where he now appears so often?' This is,
properly speaking, a scientific question; but the savage answers it, not
by collecting facts and generalising from them, but by inventing a myth.
That is his invariable habit. Does he want to know why this tree has red
berries, why that animal has brown stripes, why this bird utters its
peculiar cry, where