l years in England amid
the influences of modern society, nevertheless went off and privately
burned herself to death soon after her husband's decease.

The reader who thinks it far-fetched to interpret funeral offerings of
food, weapons, ornaments, or money, on the theory of object-souls, will
probably suggest that such offerings may be mere memorials of affection
or esteem for the dead man. Such, indeed, they have come to be in many
countries after surviving the phase of culture in which they originated;
but there is ample evidence to show that at the outset they were
presented in the belief that their ghosts would be eaten or otherwise
employed by the ghost of the dead man. The stout club which is buried
with the dead Fiji sends its soul along with him that he may be able to
defend himself against the hostile ghosts which will lie in ambush for
him on the road to Mbulu, seeking to kill and eat him. Sometimes the
club is afterwards removed from the grave as of no further use, since
its ghost is all that the dead man needs. In like manner, "as the Greeks
gave the dead man the obolus for Charon's toll, and the old Prussians
furnished him with spending money, to buy refreshment on his weary
journey, so to this day German peasants bury a corpse with money in
his mouth or hand," and this is also said to be one of the regular
ceremonies of an Irish wake. Of similar purport were the funeral feasts
and oblations of food in Greece and Italy, the "rice-cakes made with
ghee" destined for the Hindu sojourning in Yama's kingdom, and the meat
and gruel offered by the Chinaman to the manes of his ancestors. "Many
travellers have described the imagination with which the Chinese
make such offerings. It is that the spirits of the dead consume the
impalpable essence of the food, leaving behind its coarse material
substance, wherefore the dutiful sacrificers, having set out sumptuous
feasts for ancestral souls, allow them a proper time to satisfy
their appetite, and then fall to themselves." [177] So in the Homeric
sacrifice to the gods, after the deity has smelled the sweet savour
and consumed the curling steam that rises ghost-like from the roasting
viands, "the assembled warriors devour the remains." [178]

Thus far the course of fetichistic thought which we have traced out,
with Mr. Tylor's aid, is such as is not always obvious to the modern
inquirer without considerable concrete illustration. The remainder
of the process, resulting