[Footnote B: Dr F.B. Jevons[2] says: "These things ... are alike taboo: the dead body; the new-born child; blood and the shedder of blood; the divine being as well as the criminal; the sick, outcasts, and foreigners; animals as well as men; women especially, the married woman as well as the sacred virgin; food, clothes, vessels, property, house, bed, canoes, the threshing floor, the winnowing fan, a name, a word, a day; all are or may be taboo because dangerous. This short list does not contain one-hundredth part of the things which are supposed to be dangerous; but even if it were filled out and made tolerably complete, it would, by itself, fail to give any idea of the actual extent and importance of the institution of taboo."] The idea of the transmission of _mana_ through contact is concomitant with the notion of _sympathetic magic_, defined as the belief that the qualities of one thing can be mysteriously transferred to another. The most familiar illustration is that of the hunter who will not eat the heart of the deer he has killed lest he become timid like that animal, while to eat the heart of a lion would be to gain all the fierce courage of that beast.[A] This belief becomes so elaborated that the qualities of one object are finally thought to be transferred to another which has never come into direct contact with the first, the transition being accomplished through the agency of a third object which has been in contact with both the others and thus acts as the conducting medium through which the qualities of one pass into the other. [Footnote A: E.B. Tylor[3] has called attention to the belief that the qualities of the eaten pass into the eater as an explanation of the food taboos and prejudices of savage peoples.] Just as the holy thing, which is to be feared as the seat of a mystic, supernatural force, is to be avoided lest harm befall from contact with it, or lest it be denied by human touch and its divine essence be affected, so the unclean thing is also made taboo lest it infect man with its own evil nature. Even as the savage will not have his idol polluted by contact with his own personality, however indirect, so he would himself avoid pollution in similar fashion by shunning that which is unclean. Here also the avoidance of the tabooed person or thing is based on the principle of sympathetic magic understood as a method of transference of qualities, and on belief in the possibility of infection by contact.