The Penal Laws of Savage Races. Caffre. law divides itself into lines bearing some analogy to those of our criminal and civil law; such offences as treason, murder, assault, and witchcraft entering into the crim inal code, and constituting injuries to the actual sufferer's chief; whilst adultery, slan der, and other forms of theft, enter, as it were, into the civil law, as injuries for which there are direct personal remedies. The almost universal test amongst savages of guilt or innocence, where there is a want or conflict of. evidence, is the ordeal. The identity of many ordeals among differ ent peoples, such as that by fire and water, is probably due to the readiness into_ which such tests would suggest themselves to the imagination. He who, holding fire in his hand, said the Indian law, is not burnt, or who, diving under water, is not soon forced up by it, must be held veracious in his testi mony on oath; and the same was the idea in China and Africa, as well as in Europe. That these ordeals were traditionally preserved by the shamans or priests as one of the sources of their power, derives probability from their close analogy to the judicial ordeals invented and administered by the priests of early Europe. As in Europe after the fifteenth century the oath of canonical purgation grad ually displaced the older systems of ordeals, so it would seem that in savage life, too, the judicial oath succeeds in order of time the judicial ordeal. The witness in a modern English law court invoking upon himself divine wrath if he swears falsely by the book he kisses, pre serves with curious exactitude the judicial oath of savage times and lands. To understand the binding force of oaths among savages it is necessary to observe how closely connected they are with savage ideas of fetichism. The hair or food of a man, which a savage burns to rid himself of an enemy, is no mere symbol of that enemy so much as in some sense that enemy him self The physical act of touching the thing
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invoked has reference to feelings of causal connection between things, as in Samoa, where a man to attest his veracity would touch his eyes, to indicate a wish that blind ness might strike him if he lied, or would dig a hole in the ground to indicate a wish that he might be buried in the event of falsehood. In Kamschatka, if a thief remains undetect ed, the elders would summon all the ostrog together, young and old, and forming a circle round the fire, cause certain incanta tions to be employed. After the incanta tions the sinews of the back and feet of a wild sheep were thrown into the fire with magical words, and the wish expressed that the hands and feet of the culprit might grow crooked, there being apparently a connection assumed between the action of the fire on the animal's sinews and on the limbs of the man. And in Sweden there are still cunning men who can deprive a real thief of his eye, by cutting a bow and arrows into the representative feat ure. Perhaps the best illustration of this feel ing is in the practice of the Ostiaks, offering their wives, if they suspect them of infidelity, a handful oí bear's hairs, believing that, if they touch them and are guilty, they will be bitten by a bear within the space of three days. Among the Nomad races of the north, three kinds of oaths are said to be common. Firm, however, as is the savage belief that the consequences of perjury are death or dis ease, escape from the obligation of an oath is not unknown among savages. On the Guinea Coast recourse was had to the com mon expedient of priestly absolution, so that when a man took a draught-oath, impre cating death on himself if he failed in his promise, the priests were sometimes com pelled to take an oath, too, to the effect that they would not employ their absolving powers to release him. In Abyssinia, a simpler process seems to be in vogue; for the cross, thus addressed his servants: "You see King, on one occasion, having sworn by a
