It must be remembered that the entire community shares to the full the underlying beliefs, and participates in varying degrees in the fears of the bereaved spouse. We are familiar even in Europe with the effect upon a crowd--nay, upon an entire nation--of emotions felt in common. They are intensified. The atmosphere becomes electrical, and a spark suffices to produce a conflagration. When the object of the emotion is strange, imperfectly apprehended, mysterious, the effect is heightened; it becomes a species of insanity. Things are imagined which do not exist; eyewitnesses attest what a dispassionate observer knows to be impossibilities. The most appalling of the tales and the most vivid of the rites we have been considering are thus easily accounted for. The marvel is that they are not more widely distributed over the world than our present information enables us to affirm. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOURNING CLOTHES {235} It is a commonplace among anthropologists that certain events in a community cause a state of taboo, which affects the members of the community in a greater or less degree, according to their nearness of place or blood to the person principally concerned, or according to the magnitude of the event. Among these events a death is not the least important. In the lower culture the whole village or settlement is often attainted by the occurrence of a death. But it is more particularly the near relatives, and those who have been brought into contact with the corpse, who are affected by the death-taboo (or, as it is often called, the death-pollution), most of all the widow or widower. We call the period of the death-taboo--mourning. The duration of the taboo, as well as its intensity, varies among different peoples, and not only according to the relationship of the mourners to the deceased, but also to his rank, from a few days to many months, and even to years. It is very rare that there is no mourning on a death; but if our reports may be trusted, there are a few cases, which, however, need not detain us.