Some people burn their loose hair to save it from falling into the power of sorcerers. This is done by the Patagonians and some of the Victorian tribes.(738) The Makololo of South Africa either burn it or bury it secretly,(739) and the same alternative is sometimes adopted by the Tirolese.(740) Cut and combed out hair is burned in Pomerania and sometimes at Liége.(741) In Norway the parings of nails are either burned or buried, lest the elves or the Finns should find them and make them into bullets wherewith to shoot the cattle.(742) This destruction of the hair or nails plainly involves an inconsistency of thought. The object of the destruction is avowedly to prevent these severed portions of the body from being used by sorcerers. But the possibility of their being so used depends upon the supposed sympathetic connection between them and the man from whom they were severed. And if this sympathetic connection still exists, clearly these severed portions cannot be destroyed without injury to the man. Before leaving this subject, on which I have perhaps dwelt too long, it may be well to call attention to the motive assigned for cutting a young child’s hair in Roti.(743) In that island the first hair is regarded as a danger to the child, and its removal is intended to avert the danger. The reason of this may be that as a young child is almost universally supposed to be in a tabooed or dangerous state, it is necessary, in removing the taboo, to destroy the separable parts of the child’s body on the ground that they are infected, so to say, by the virus of the taboo and as such are dangerous. The cutting of the child’s hair would thus be exactly parallel to the destruction of the vessels which have been used by a tabooed person.(744) This view is borne out by a practice, observed by some Australians, of burning off part of a woman’s hair after childbirth as well as burning every vessel which has been used by her during her seclusion.(745) Here the burning of the woman’s hair seems plainly intended to serve the same purpose as the burning of the vessels used by her; and as the vessels are burned because they are believed to be tainted with a dangerous infection, so, we must suppose, is also the hair. We can, therefore, understand the importance attached by many peoples to the first cutting of a child’s hair and the elaborate ceremonies by which the operation is accompanied.(746) Again, we can understand why a man should poll his head after a journey.(747) For we have seen that a traveller is often believed to contract a dangerous infection from strangers and that, therefore, on his return home he is obliged to submit to various purificatory ceremonies before he is allowed to mingle freely with his own people.(748) On my hypothesis the polling of the hair is simply one of these purificatory or disinfectant ceremonies. The cutting of the hair after a vow may have the same meaning. It is a way of ridding the man of