put this too high when I say that a most important if
not the most important object of early legislation was the enforcement
of LUCKY rites. I do not like to say religious rites, because that
would involve me in a great controversy as to the power, or even the
existence, of early religions. But there is no savage tribe without a
notion of luck; and perhaps there is hardly any which has not a
conception of luck for the tribe as a tribe, of which each member has
not some such a belief that his own action or the action of any other
member of it--that he or the others doing anything which was unlucky or
would bring a 'curse'--might cause evil not only to himself, but to all
the tribe as well. I have said so much about 'luck' and about its
naturalness before, that I ought to say nothing again. But I must add
that the contagiousness of the idea of 'luck' is remarkable. It does
not at all, like the notion of desert, cleave to the doer. There are
people to this day who would not permit in their house people to sit
down thirteen to dinner. They do not expect any evil to themselves
particularly for permitting it or sharing in it, but they cannot get
out of their heads the idea that some one or more of the number will
come to harm if the thing is done. This is what Mr. Tylor calls
survival in culture. The faint belief in the corporate liability of
these thirteen is the feeble relic and last dying representative of
that great principle of corporate liability to good and ill fortune
which has filled such an immense place in the world.

The traces of it are endless. You can hardly take up a book of travels
in rude regions without finding 'I wanted to do so and so. But I was
not permitted, for the natives feared it might bring ill luck on the
"party," or perhaps the tribe.' Mr. Galton, for instance, could hardly
feed his people. The Damaras, he says, have numberless superstitions
about meat which are very troublesome. In the first place, each tribe,
or rather family, is prohibited from eating cattle of certain colours,
savages 'who come from the sun' eschewing sheep spotted in a particular
way, which those 'who come from the rain' have no objection to. 'As,'
he says, 'there are five or six eandas or descents, and I had men from
most of them with me, I could hardly kill a sheep that everybody would
eat;' and he could not keep his meat, for it had to be given away
because it was commanded by one superstition, nor buy milk, the staple
fo