Earth from a man’s footprints, on account of its close contact with the person, has acquired the virtues of a portion of his body. Widely spread in Germany is the belief that if a sod whereon a man has trodden—all the better if with the naked foot—be taken up and dried behind the hearth or oven, he will parch up with it and languish, or his foot will be withered. He will be lamed, or even killed, by sticking his footprint with nails—coffin nails are the best—or broken glass (30, ii. 78); but these are also the practices of Australian or other savages. To quote only one example from Australia (34, 26), sharp fragments of quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal are buried in the footprints of the victim or in the mark made in the ground by his reclining body. They are supposed to enter the victim, and rheumatic affections are very frequently attributed to them. Clothes, from their intimate association with the person, have naturally attained a prominent place among the instruments of witchcraft. In Germany and Denmark no portion of a survivor’s clothing must on any account be put upon a corpse, else the owner will languish away as it moulders in the grave. To hang rags from the clothing of a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. ‘Probably,’ as Mr. Hartland suggests, ‘it is only a different interpretation of the same belief which alike in Christian, in Mohammedan, and in Buddhist lands has led to the ascription of marvellous powers to the clothes and other relics of departed saints. The divine power which was immanent in these personages during life attaches not merely to every portion of their bodies but to every shred of their apparel’ (30, ii. 90). An illustrative parallel can be taken from the Pacific. The red feathers which adorned the sacred girdle worn by the Tahitian kings were taken from the images of the gods. The girdle ‘thus became sacred, even as the person of the gods, the feathers being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of power and vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.’ So potent was it that Mr. Ellis says (17, iii. 108) it ‘not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with their gods.’