An opinion is not necessarily erroneous because it is obsolete, nor a view wrong because 'it is generally abandoned.' I am here supporting the 'generally abandoned' hypothesis that many taboos, at least, are artificial and imposed, against Mr. Jevons's idea that the taboo, like armorial bearings, results from 'an inherent tendency of the human mind' 'prior to and even contradictory of experience.'[3] That 'a new-born baby is dangerous,' or that 'the water in which a holy person has washed is dangerous,' my private experience does not tell me; in fact, I never made either experiment: never tubbed in the water previously used by a bishop. But I am prepared to admit that neither babies nor bishops are proved by our experience to be dangerous. That is not the question. The savage argued, not from unbiassed and impartial scientific experiment, but from _fancied_ experience. Thus Mr. Jevons mentions a Maori who died after rinding out that he had eaten, unawares, the remains of the luncheon of a holy person, a chief. There was experience produced by suggestion. The suggestion was suggested in the interests of holy chiefs; they were 'tabooed an inch thick,' as Mr. Manning writes. As to the baby, the Dyaks, as in our own fairy belief, hold that 'new-born children are the especial prey of evil spirits,' just as corpses were in--Scotland, where, if the door was left ajar, the corpse sat up, and mopped and mowed. If the watchers left it, and dined in the 'but,' an awful _vacarme_ arose in the 'ben.' The minister entered, stilled the tumult, asked for the tongs, and came back holding in the tongs _a bloody glove_! This he dropped into the fire. This kind of thing is contradictory to the experience of Mr. Jevons, but not to the _fancied_ experience of Dyaks, Scots, and other races. Opinion therefore makes taboos in accordance with experience, or what is believed to be experience, and the belief is fortified by suggestion, which produces death or disease when the taboo is broken. On the analogy of infectious diseases, the mischief of the tabooed thing is held to be contagious.