They were to follow it out eight miles, where it was to be turned loose for any man who would take it. If the animal returned the disease must return with it, and the ceremony be performed over again.... It was, however, subsequently determined that the animal should be a goat; and he was driven before the crowd accordingly. I have on several occasions been requested to allow of such noisy ceremonies in cases of epidemics.”(527) Once, when influenza was raging in Pithuria, a man had a small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scapegoats, which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at some distance, where they were let loose. From that hour the disease entirely ceased in the town. The goats never returned; had they done so, “the disease must have come back with them.”(528) The idea of the scapegoat is not uncommon in the hills of the Eastern Ghats. In 1886, during a severe outbreak of small-pox, the people of Jeypur made “puja” to a goat, marched it to the Ghats, and let it loose on the plains.(529) In Southern Konkan, on the appearance of cholera, the villagers went in procession from the temple to the extreme boundaries of the village, carrying a basket of cooked rice covered with red powder, a wooden doll representing the pestilence, and a cock. The head of the cock was cut off at the village boundary, and the body was thrown away. When cholera was thus transferred from one village to another, the second village observed the same ceremony and passed on the scourge to its neighbours, and so on through a number of villages.(530) When the Aymara Indians were suffering from a plague, they loaded a llama with the clothes of the plague-stricken people, and drove the animal into the mountains, hoping that it would take the plague away with it.(531) Sometimes the scapegoat is a man. Some of the aboriginal tribes of China, as a protection against pestilence, select a man of great muscular strength to act the part of scapegoat. Having besmeared his face with paint, he performs many antics with the view of enticing all pestilential and noxious influences to attach themselves to him only. He is assisted by a priest. Finally the scapegoat, hotly pursued by men and women beating gongs and tom-toms, is driven with great haste out of the town or village.(532) A Hindu cure for the murrain is to hire a man of the Chamár caste, turn his face away from the village, brand him with a red-hot sickle, and let him go out into the jungle, taking the murrain with him. He must not look back.(533)