[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

120 WITH NATIVES IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

The natives showed great reluctance in bringing
me skulls and skeletons. As the bones decay very
quickly in the tropics, only skulls of people recently
deceased can be had. The demon, or soul, of the
dead is supposed to be too lively as yet to be
wantonly offended;. in any case, one dislikes to
disturb one's own relatives, while there is less
delicacy about those of others. Still, in course of
time, I gathered quite a good collection of skulls
at the station. They were brought carefully wrapped
up in leaves, fastened with lianas, and tied to long
sticks, with which the bearer held the disgusting
object as far from him as possible. The bundles
were laid down, and the people watched with ad-
miring disgust as I untied the ropes and handled
the bones as one would any other object. Every—
thing that had touched the bones became to the
natives an object of the greatest awe; still they
enjoyed pushing the leaves that had wrapped them
up under the feet of an unsuspecting friend, who
presently, warned of the danger, escaped with a
terrified shriek and a wild jump. It would seem
that physical disgust had as much to do with all
this as religious fear, although the natives show
none of this disgust at handling the remains of pigs.
Naturally, the old men were the most superstitious;
the young ones were more emancipated, some of
them even going the length of picking up a bone
with their toes.

Most of them had quite a similar dread of
snakes, but some men handled them without much