that the sun sends hail, from which it naturally follows that he can send you a tooth as smooth and white and hard as a hailstone. Among the peasants of the Lebanon, when a child loses a milk tooth, he throws it {p182} towards the sun, saying, “Sun, sun, take the ass’s tooth and give me the deer’s tooth.” They sometimes say jestingly that the child’s tooth has been carried off by a mouse.​[662] An Armenian generally buries his extracted teeth at the edge of the hearth with the prayer: “Grandfather, take a dog’s tooth and give me a golden tooth.”​[663] In the light of the preceding examples, we may conjecture that the grandfather here invoked is not so much the soul of a dead ancestor as a mouse or a rat. [Sidenote: Contagious magic of navel-string and afterbirth among the Maoris and the aborigines of Australia.] Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic union with the body, after the physical connexion has been severed, are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including the placenta. So intimate, indeed, is the union conceived to be, that the fortunes of the individual for good or evil throughout life are often supposed to be bound up with one or other of these portions of his person, so that if his navel-string or afterbirth is preserved and properly treated, he will be prosperous; whereas if it be injured or lost, he will suffer accordingly. Thus among the Maoris, when the navel-string dropped off, the child was carried to a priest to be solemnly named by him. But before the ceremony of naming began, the navel-string was buried in a sacred place and a young sapling was planted over it. Ever afterwards that tree, as it grew, was a _tohu oranga_ or sign of life for the child.​[664] In the Upper Whakatane valley, in the North Island of New Zealand, there is a famous _hinau_ tree, to which the Maoris used to attach the navel-strings of their children; and barren women were in the habit of embracing the tree in the hope of thereby obtaining offspring.​[665] Again, among the Maoris, “the placenta is named _fenua_, which word signifies land. It is applied by the natives to the placenta, from their supposing it to be the residence of the child: on being discharged it is immediately buried with {p183} great care, as they have the superstitious idea that the priests, if offended, would procure it; and, by praying over it, occasion the death of both mother and child, by ‘praying them to death,’ to use their own expression.”​[666] Again, some of the natives of South Australia regarded the placenta as sacred and carefully put it away out of reach of the dogs,​[667] doubtless because they thought that harm would come to the child if this part of himself were eaten by the animals. Certain tribes of Western Australia believe that a man swims well or ill, according as his mother at his birth threw the navel-string into water or not.​[668] Among the Arunta of Central Australia the navel-string