Madagascar used to be tabooed to strangers of the white race, the natives imagining that the intrusion of a white man would immediately cause the death of their king. The traveller Bastard had the greatest difficulty in overcoming the reluctance of the natives to allow him to enter their land and especially to visit their holy city.(359) Amongst the Ot Danoms of Borneo it is the custom that strangers entering the territory should pay to the natives a certain sum, which is spent in the sacrifice of buffaloes or pigs to the spirits of the land and water, in order to reconcile them to the presence of the strangers, and to induce them not to withdraw their favour from the people of the country, but to bless the rice-harvest, and so forth.(360) The men of a certain district in Borneo, fearing to look upon a European traveller lest he should make them ill, warned their wives and children not to go near him. Those who could not restrain their curiosity killed fowls to appease the evil spirits and smeared themselves with the blood.(361) “More dreaded,” says a traveller in central Borneo, “than the evil spirits of the neighbourhood are the evil spirits from a distance which accompany travellers. When a company from the middle Mahakam river visited me among the Blu-u Kayans in the year 1897, no woman shewed herself outside her house without a burning bundle of _plehiding_ bark, the stinking smoke of which drives away evil spirits.”(362) In Laos, before a stranger can be accorded hospitality, the master of the house must offer sacrifice to the ancestral spirits; otherwise the spirits would be offended and would send disease on the inmates.(363) When Madame Pfeiffer arrived at the village of Hali-Bonar, among the Battas of Sumatra, a buffalo was killed and the liver offered to her. Then a ceremony was performed to propitiate the evil spirits. Two young men danced, and one of them in dancing sprinkled water from a buffalo’s horn on the visitor and the spectators.(364) In the Mentawei Islands, when a stranger enters a house where there are children, the father or other member of the family takes the ornament which the children wear in their hair and hands it to the stranger, who holds it in his hands for a while and then gives it back to him. This is thought to protect the children from the evil effect which the sight of a stranger might have upon them.(365) When a Dutch steamship was approaching their villages, the people of Biak, an island off the north coast of New Guinea, shook and knocked their idols about in order to ward off ill-luck.(366) At Shepherd’s Isle Captain Moresby had to be disenchanted before he was allowed to land his boat’s crew. When he leaped ashore, a devil-man seized his right hand and waved a bunch of palm leaves over the captain’s head. Then “he placed the leaves in my left hand, putting a small green twig into his mouth, still holding me fast, and then, as if with great effort,