long enough to allow the soul of the beast to abstract and convey away the souls of the things, the hunter is free to cut up and consume the carcase. Some years ago, when heavy rains caused a land-slip in these wild mountains, and a house with its inmates was buried in the ruins, public opinion in the neighbourhood attributed the disaster to the misconduct of the deceased, who had failed to appease the soul of a boa-constrictor slain by them on haunted ground.(891) (M218) In the Solomon Islands a man at the point of death would gather the members of his family about him and inform them of the particular sort of creature, say a bird or a butterfly, into which he proposed to transmigrate. Henceforth the family would regard that species of animal as sacred and would neither kill nor injure it. If they fell in with a creature of the kind, it might be a bird or a butterfly, they would say, “That is papa,” and offer him a coco-nut.(892) In these islands sharks are very often supposed to be ghosts, for dying people frequently announce their intention of being sharks when they have put off their human shape. After that, if any shark remarkable for its size or colour is seen to haunt a certain shore or rock, it is taken to be somebody’s ghost, and the name of the deceased is given to it. For example, at Ulawa a dreaded man-eating shark received the name of a dead man and was propitiated with offerings of porpoise teeth. At Saa, certain food, for example coco-nuts from particular trees, is reserved to feed such a ghost-shark, but men of whom it is positively known that after death they will be in sharks are allowed by anticipation to partake of the shark-food in the sacred place. Other men will sometimes join themselves to their company, and speaking with the voice of a shark-ghost will say, “Give me to eat of that food.” If such a man happens to be really possessed of supernatural power, he will in due time become a shark-ghost himself; but it is perfectly possible that he may fail. In Savo not very long ago a certain man had a shark that he used to feed and to which he offered sacrifice. He swam out to it with food, called it by name, and it came to him. Of course it was not a common shark, but a ghost, the knowledge of which had been handed down to him from his ancestors. Alligators also may lodge the souls of dead Solomon Islanders. In the island of Florida a story was told of an alligator that used to come up out of the sea and make itself quite at home in the village in which the man whose ghost it was had lived. It went by the name of the deceased, and though there was one man in particular who had special connexion with it and was said to own it, the animal was on friendly terms with everybody in the place and would even let children ride on its back. But the village where this happened has not yet been identified.(893) In the same island the appearance of anything wonderful is taken as proof of a ghostly presence and stamps the place as sacred.