[285] In various countries in Europe these objects give place to a piece of money put into the mouth or the hand of the dead; as one never knows what may happen, it is always well to have a little money at one’s service.
[286] Many practices in relation to the dead are explained by the belief that they are sleeping for a greater or less time (see p. [216]). Thus, among the Micronesians of the Gilbert Islands, the woman sleeps by the side of her dead husband, and covers her body with the putrid matter which oozes from the corpse.
[287] Even in the cases where several arrows have pierced the animal their reciprocal positions decided to whom belonged such or such part of the slain animal; the skin, for instance, was his whose arrow had penetrated nearest to the heart.
[288] Kovalewsky, Tableau des origines de la famille, etc., pp. 59 and 91, Stockholm, 1890; Maine, Early History of Institutions, London, 1875.
[289] G. L. Gomme, The Village Community, London, 1890; and Kovalewsky, loc. cit. Baden-Powell, Indian Village Com., London, 1896.
[290] J. G. Frazer, Totemism, London, 1887 (expanded from his article in vol. xxiii. of the Encyclopædia Britannica); E. Smith, Second Ann. Rep. Bur. of Ethnol., 1880–81, p. 77, Washington, 1883.
[291] This family régime of society is closely allied to the worship of ancestors and the “hearth,” as the names given to the communities show (“feu” in France, “pechtchiché” in the Ukraine).
[292] Laveleye, Propriété primitive, p. 9, Paris, 1891; Kovalewsky, loc. cit., passim; Sakuya Yoshida, Geschichtl. Entwickl. d. Staats-Verfass. in Japan, p. 46, Hague, 1890; Bancroft, Native Races of Pacific States, vol. ii., p. 226, San Francisco, 1882.
[293] See Andree, Ethnolog. Parallele, p. 250.
[294] See for further details, Post, loc. cit., Grundriss der ethnol. Jurisprud., vol. i.