They do not expect any evil to themselves particularly for
permitting it or sharing in it, but they cannot get out of their
heads the idea that some one or more of the number will come to harm
if the thing is done. This is what Mr. Tylor calls survival in
culture. The faint belief in the corporate liability of these
thirteen is the feeble relic and last dying representative of that
great principle of corporate liability to good and ill fortune which
has filled such an immense place in the world.
The traces of it are endless. You can hardly take up a book of
travels in rude regions without finding 'I wanted to do so and so.
But I was not permitted, for the natives feared it might bring ill
luck on the "party," or perhaps the tribe.' Mr. Galton, for
instance, could hardly feed his people. The Damaras, he says, have
numberless superstitions about meat which are very troublesome. In
the first place, each tribe, or rather family, is prohibited from
eating cattle of certain colours, savages 'who come from the sun'
eschewing sheep spotted in a particular way, which those 'who come
from the rain' have no objection to. 'As,' he says, 'there are five
or six eandas or descents, and I had men from most of them with me,
I could hardly kill a sheep that everybody would eat;' and he could
not keep his meat, for it had to be given away because it was
commanded by one superstition, nor buy milk, the staple food of
those parts, because it was prohibited by another.
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