All the men present then seize branches with young buds. One of them holds ginger in his hand, which, after reciting a spell over it, he distributes to the others. They chew it and spit it out on the twigs, and these twigs are afterwards laid on the shields and other weapons in the house, and also on the slips which are to be planted; moreover they are fastened on the roofs and over the doorways of the houses. In this way they seek to annul the noxious infection of childbirth.(534) Among the Yabim of German New Guinea, when a birth has taken place in the village, all the inhabitants remain at home next morning “in order that the fruits of the field may not be spoiled.”(535) Apparently they fear that if they went out to their fields and gardens immediately after a woman had been brought to bed, they would carry with them a dangerous contagion which might blight the crops. When a Herero woman has given birth to a child, her female companions hastily construct a special hut for her to which she is transferred. Both the hut and the woman are sacred and “for this reason, the men are not allowed to see the lying-in woman until the navel string has separated from the child, otherwise they would become weaklings, and when later they _yumbana_, that is, go to war with spear and bow, they would be shot.”(536) Thus the Herero like the Sulka appear to imagine that the weakness of a lying-in woman can, on the principles of homoeopathic magic, infect any men who may chance to see her. (M95) Among the Saragacos Indians of eastern Ecuador, as soon as a woman feels the travail-pangs beginning, she retires into the forest to a distance of three or four leagues from her home, where she takes up her abode in a hut of leaves which has been already prepared for her. “This banishment,” we are told, “is the fruit of the superstition of these Indians, who are persuaded that the spirit of evil would attach himself to their house if the women were brought to bed in it.”(537) The Esquimaux of Baffin Land think that the body of a lying-in woman exhales a vapour which would adhere to the souls of seals if she ate the flesh of any seals except such as have been caught by her husband, by a boy, or by an aged man. “Cases of premature birth require particularly careful treatment. The event must be announced publicly, else dire results will follow. If a woman should conceal from the other people that she has had a premature birth, they might come near her, or even eat in her hut of the seals procured by her husband. The vapor arising from her would thus affect them, and they would be avoided by the seals. The transgression would also become attached to the soul of the seal, which would take it down to Sedna,” the mythical mother of the sea-mammals, who lives in the lower world and controls the destinies of mankind.(538)