knives, and the women who served up the food were also without knives. If any morsels fell from the table they were left lying there for the lonely souls that had no living relations or friends to feed them. When the meal was over the priest took a broom and swept the souls out of the house, saying, “Dear souls, ye have eaten and drunk. Go forth, go forth.”(766) In cutting the nails and combing the hair of a dead prince in South Celebes only the back of the knife and of the comb may be used.(767) The Germans say that a knife should not be left edge upwards, because God and the spirits dwell there, or because it will cut the face of God and the angels.(768) Among the Monumbos of New Guinea a pregnant woman may not use sharp instruments; for example, she may not sew. If she used such instruments, they think that she would thereby stab the child in her womb.(769) Among the Kayans of Borneo, when the birth-pangs begin, all men leave the room, and all cutting weapons and iron are also removed, “perhaps in order not to frighten the child,” says the writer who reports the custom.(770) The reason may rather be a fear of injuring the flitting soul of mother or babe. In Uganda, when the hour of a woman’s delivery is at hand, her husband carries all spears and weapons out of the house,(771) doubtless in order that they may not hurt the tender soul of the new-born child. Early in the period of the Ming dynasty a professor of geomancy made the alarming discovery that the spiritual atmosphere of Kü-yung, a city near Nanking, was in a truly deplorable condition through the intrusion of an evil spirit. The Chinese emperor, with paternal solicitude, directed that the north gate, by which the devil had effected his entrance, should be built up solid, and that for the future the population of the city should devote their energies to the pursuits of hair-dressing, corn-cutting, and the shaving of bamboo-roots, because, as he sagaciously perceived, all these professions call for the use of sharp-edged instruments, which could not fail to keep the demon at bay.(772) We can now understand why no cutting instrument may be taken into the house of the Burmese pontiff. Like so many priestly kings, he is probably regarded as divine, and it is therefore right that his sacred spirit should not be exposed to the risk of being cut or wounded whenever it quits his body to hover invisible in the air or to fly on some distant mission. § 4. Blood tabooed.