the field, fearing that if they did so the crop would be all straw and no grain.[1] In Orissa, also, growing rice is “considered as a pregnant woman, and the same ceremonies are observed with regard to it as in the case of human females.”[2]
Conceived as animate, trees are necessarily supposed to feel injuries done to them. When an oak is being felled “it gives a kind of shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heard it severall times.”[3] The Ojebways “very seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts them to pain, and some of their medicine-men profess to have heard the wailing of the trees under the axe.”[4] Old peasants in some parts of Austria still believe that forest-trees are animate, and will not allow an incision to be made in the bark without special cause; they have heard from their fathers that the tree feels the cut not less than a wounded man his hurt. In felling a tree they beg its pardon.[5] So in Jarkino the woodman craves pardon of the tree he cuts down.[6] Again, when a tree is cut it is thought to bleed. Some Indians dare not cut a certain plant, because there comes out a red juice which they take for the blood of the plant.[7] In Samoa there was a grove of trees which no one dared cut. Once some strangers tried to do so, but blood flowed from the tree, and the sacrilegious strangers fell ill and died.[8] Till 1855 there was a sacred larch-tree at Nauders, in the Tyrol,
- ↑ Van Hoëvell, Ambon en meer bepaaldelijk de Oeliasers, p. 62.
- ↑ The Indian Antiquary, i. 170.
- ↑ J. Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme, p. 247.
- ↑ Peter Jones’s History of the Ojebway Indians, p. 104.
- ↑ A. Peter, Volksthümliches aus Österrekhisch-Schlesien, ii. 30.
- ↑ Bastian, Indonesien, i. 154; cp. id., Die Völker des östlichen Asien, ii. 457 sq., iii. 251 sq., iv. 42 sq.
- ↑ Loubere, Siam, p. 126.
- ↑ Turner, Samoa, p. 63.
