child.​[483] In Macedonia the first fruit of a tree should not be eaten by a barren woman but by one who has many children.​[484] The Nicobar Islanders think it lucky to get a pregnant woman and her husband to plant seed in gardens.​[485] The Greeks and Romans sacrificed pregnant victims to the goddesses of the corn and of the earth, doubtless in order that the earth might teem and the corn swell in the ear.​[486] When a Catholic priest remonstrated with the Indians of the Orinoco on allowing their women to sow the fields in the blazing sun, with infants at their breasts, the men answered, “Father, you don’t understand these things, and that is why they vex you. You know that women are accustomed to bear children, and that we men are not. When the women sow, the stalk of the maize bears two or three ears, the root of the yucca yields two or three {p142} basketfuls, and everything multiplies in proportion. Now why is that? Simply because the women know how to bring forth, and know how to make the seed which they sow bring forth also. Let them sow, then; we men don’t know as much about it as they do.”​[487] For the same reason, probably, the Tupinambas of Brazil thought that if a certain earth-almond were planted by the men, it would not grow.​[488] Among the Ilocans of Luzon the men sow bananas, but the sower must have a young child on his shoulder, or the bananas will bear no fruit.​[489] When a tree bears no fruit, the Galelareese think it is a male; and their remedy is simple. They put a woman’s petticoat on the tree, which, being thus converted into a female, will naturally prove prolific.​[490] On the other hand the Baganda believe that a barren wife infects her husband’s garden with her own sterility and prevents the trees from bearing fruit; hence a childless woman is generally divorced.​[491] For a like reason, probably, the Wajagga of East Africa throw away the corpse of a childless woman, with all her belongings, in the forest or in any other place where the land is never cultivated; moreover her body is not carried out of the door of the hut, but a special passage is broken for it through the wall,​[492] no doubt to prevent her dangerous ghost from finding its way back.​[493] [Sidenote: Taboos based on the belief that persons can influence vegetation homoeopathically by their acts or states.]