de Roepstorff, “prevails among them which one would suppose must most effectually hinder the ‘making of history,’ or, at any rate, the transmission of historical narrative. By a strict rule, which has all the sanction of Nicobar superstition, no man’s name may be mentioned after his death! To such a length is this carried that when, as very frequently happens, the man rejoiced in the name of ‘Fowl,’ ‘Hat,’ ‘Fire,’ ‘Road,’ etc., in its Nicobarese equivalent, the use of these words is carefully eschewed for the future, not only as being the personal designation of the deceased, but even as the names of the common things they represent; the words die out of the language, and either new vocables are coined to express the thing intended, or a substitute for the disused word is found in other Nicobarese dialects or in some foreign tongue. This extraordinary custom not only adds an element of instability to the language, but destroys the continuity of political life, and renders the record of past events precarious and vague, if not impossible.”(1375) (M218) That a superstition which suppresses the names of the dead must cut at the very root of historical tradition has been remarked by other workers in this field. “The Klamath people,” observes Mr. A. S. Gatschet, “possess no historic traditions going further back in time than a century, for the simple reason that there was a strict law prohibiting the mention of the person or acts of a deceased individual by _using his name_. This law was rigidly observed among the Californians no less than among the Oregonians, and on its transgression the death penalty could be inflicted. This is certainly enough to suppress all historical knowledge within a people. How can history be written without names?”(1376) Among some of the tribes of New South Wales the simple ditties, never more than two lines long, to which the natives dance, are never transmitted from one generation to another, because, when the rude poet dies, “all the songs of which he was author are, as it were, buried with him, inasmuch as they, in common with his very name, are studiously ignored from thenceforward, consequently they are quite forgotten in a very short space of time indeed. This custom of endeavouring persistently to forget everything which had been in any way connected with the dead entirely precludes the possibility of anything of an historical nature having existence amongst them; in fact the most vital occurrence, if only dating a single generation back, is quite forgotten, that is to say, if the recounting thereof should necessitate the mention of a defunct aboriginal’s name.”(1377) Thus among these simple savages even a sacred bard could not avail to rescue an Australian Agamemnon from the long night of oblivion.