[54] Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 124. Andrew Lang (in Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor) holds that this Australian view comes not from ignorance but from the desire to assign a worthy origin to man in distinction from the lower animals. Some tribes in North Queensland think that the latter have not souls, and are born by sexual union, but the human soul, they say, can come only from a spiritual being. Decision on this question must await further information.
[55] Spencer and Gillen, loc. cit.
[56] Journal of American Folklore, xvii, 4.
[57] Hopkins, Religions of India, p. 530 (the child is the returned soul of an ancestor).
[58] Codrington, Melanesians, p. 154 (a spirit child enters a woman); cf. Journal of the American Oriental Society, viii, 297 (the Nusairi), and Lyde, in Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, p. 115; Hartland, Primitive Paternity, i, 50, and chap. 3 passim.
[59] A. B. Ellis, The Eẃe-speaking Peoples, p. 15; The Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 18.
[60] For the belief that the soul of the child comes from the shades see Journal of American Folklore, xiv, 83. Further, Tylor, Primitive Culture, chap. xii; Lang, in article cited above; Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, ii. 96.
[61] Possibly a survival of the theory is to be recognized in the custom, prevalent among some peoples, of naming a male child after his grandfather; examples are given in Gray, Hebrew Proper Names, p. 2 f. All such theories appear to rest on a dim conception of the vital solidarity of the tribe or clan—the vital force is held to be transmissible; cf. the idea of mana, a force inherent in things.
[62] Gen. ii, 7; cf. Ezek. xxxvii, 10.
[63] Timæus, 34 f.