Mr. Gomme, in his _Ethnology in Folklore_, supplies an account of a singular village festival in Southern India. In this feast, a priest, known as the Potraj, and specially armed with a divine whip, like the scourge of Osiris, sacrifices a sacred buffalo, which is turned loose when a calf, and allowed to feed and roam about the village. In that case, we have the common substitution of an animal for a human victim, which almost always accompanies advancing civilisation. At the high festival, the head of the buffalo was struck off at a single blow, and placed in front of the shrine of the village goddess. Around were placed vessels containing the different cereals, and hard by a heap of mixed grains with a drill-plough in the centre. The carcase was then cut up into small pieces, and each cultivator received a portion to bury in his field. The heap of grain was finally divided among all the cultivators, to be buried by each one in his field with the bit of flesh. At last, the head, that very sacred part, was buried before a little temple, sacred to the goddess of boundaries. The goddess is represented by a shapeless stone--no doubt a Terminus, {289}or rather the tombstone of an artificial goddess, a girl buried under an ancient boundary-mark. Here we have evidently a last stage of the same ritual which in the case of the Khonds was performed with a human victim. It is worth while noting that, as part of this ceremony, a struggle took place for portions of the victim. A still more attenuated form of the same ceremony is mentioned by Captain Harkness and others, as occurring among the Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills. I condense their accounts, taking out of each such elements as are most cognate to our purpose. Among these barbarians, the first furrow is ploughed by a low-caste Kurrumbar, who gives his benediction to the field, without which there would be no harvest. Here, the member of the aboriginal race is clearly looked upon as a priest or kinsman of the local gods, whose cooperation must be obtained by later intrusive races. But the Kurrumbar does not merely bless the field; he also sets up a stone in its midst; and then, prostrating himself before the stone, he sacrifices a goat, the head of which he keeps as his perquisite. This peculiar value of the oracular head retained by the priest is also significant. When harvest-time comes, the same Kurrumbar is summoned once more, in order that he may reap the first handful of corn, an episode the full importance of which will only be apparent to those who have read Mr. Frazer’s analysis of harvest customs. But in this case also, the appearance of the sacred stone is pregnant with meaning. We can hardly resist the inference that we have here to do with the animal substitute for a human sacrifice of the god-making order, in which the victim was slaughtered, a stone set up to mark the site of the sacrifice, and the head preserved as a god to give oracles, in the