(M73) Similarly the Lao or Laosians of Siam, though they are nominally Buddhists, and have monks and pagodas with images of Buddha, are said to pay more respect to spirits or demons than to these idols.(291) “The desire to propitiate the good spirits and to exorcise the bad ones is the prevailing influence upon the life of a Laosian. With _phees_ [evil spirits] to right of him, to left of him, in front of him, behind him, all round him, his mind is haunted with a perpetual desire to make terms with them, and to ensure the assistance of the great Buddha, so that he may preserve both body and soul from the hands of the spirits.”(292) “Independently of the demons who are in hell, the Siamese recognise another sort of devils diffused in the air: they call them _phi_; these are, they say, the demons who do harm to men and who appear sometimes in horrible shapes. They put down to the account of these malign spirits all the calamities which happen in the world. If a mother has lost a child, it is a _phi_ who has done the ill turn; if a sick man is given over, it is a _phi_ that is at the bottom of it. To appease him, they invoke him and make him offerings which they hang up in desert places.”(293) As to the Thay, a widely spread race of Indo-China,(294) a French missionary writes as follows: “It may be said that the Thay lives in constant intercourse with the invisible world. There is hardly an act of his life which is not regulated by some religious belief. There are two worships, the worship of the spirits and the worship of the dead, which, however, are scarcely distinguishable from each other, since the dead become spirits by the mere fact of their death. His simple imagination represents to him the world of spirits as a sort of double of the state of things here below. At the summit is Po Then, the father of the empyrean. Below him are the Then—Then Bun, Then Kum, Then Kom, of whom the chief is Then Luong, ‘the great Then.’ The dead go and cultivate his rice-fields in heaven and clear his mountains, just as they did their own in their life on earth. He has to wife a goddess Me Bau. Besides these heavenly spirits, the Thay reckons a multitude of others under the name of _phi_. His science being not very extensive, many things seem extraordinary to him. If he cannot explain a certain natural phenomenon, his perplexity does not last long. It is the work of a _phi_, he says, and his priests take care not to dissuade him. Hence he sees spirits everywhere. There are _phi_ on the steep mountains, in the deep woods, the _phi bai_ who, by night on the mountain, imitate the rain and the storms and leave no trace of their passage. If they shew themselves, they appear in the form of gigantic animals and cause terrible stomach troubles, such as diarrhœa, dysentery, and so on.... The large animals of the forest, wild oxen and buffaloes, rhinoceroses, elephants, and so on, have their guardian spirits. Hence the prudent hunter learns at