leave him there for a while is the regular treatment for insanity.(154) (M51) In like manner it is probable that beating or scourging as a religious or ceremonial rite was originally a mode of purification. It was meant to wipe off and drive away a dangerous contagion, whether personified as demoniacal or not, which was supposed to be adhering physically, though invisibly, to the body of the sufferer.(155) The pain inflicted on the person beaten was no more the object of the beating than it is of a surgical operation with us; it was a necessary accident, that was all. In later times such customs were interpreted otherwise, and the pain, from being an accident, became the prime object of the ceremony, which was now regarded either as a test of endurance imposed upon persons at critical epochs of life, or as a mortification of the flesh well pleasing to the god. But asceticism, under any shape or form, is never primitive. The savage, it is true, in certain circumstances will voluntarily subject himself to pains and privations which appear to us wholly needless; but he never acts thus unless he believes that some solid temporal advantage is to be gained by so doing. Pain for the sake of pain, whether as a moral discipline in this life or as a means of winning a glorious immortality hereafter, is not an object which he sets himself deliberately to pursue. (M52) If this view is correct, we can understand why so many Indian tribes of South America compel the youth of both sexes to submit to these painful and sometimes fatal ordeals. They imagine that in this way they rid the young folk of certain evils inherent in youth, especially at the critical age of puberty; and when they picture to themselves the evils in a personal form as dangerous spirits or demons, the ceremony of their expulsion may in the strict sense be termed an exorcism. This certainly appears to be the interpretation which the Banivas of the Orinoco put upon the cruel scourgings which they inflict on girls at puberty. At her first menstruation a Baniva girl must pass several days and nights in her hammock, almost motionless and getting nothing to eat and drink but water and a little manioc. While she lies there, the suitors for her hand apply to her father, and he who can afford to give most for her or can prove himself the best man, is promised the damsel in marriage. The fast over, some old men enter the hut, bandage the girl’s eyes, cover her head with a bonnet of which the fringes fall on her shoulders, and then lead her forth and tie her to a post set up in an open place. The head of the post is carved in the shape of a grotesque face. None but the old men may witness what follows. Were a woman caught peeping and prying, it would go ill with her; she would be marked out for the vengeance of the demon, who would make her expiate her crime at the very next moon by madness or death. Every participant in the ceremony comes armed with a scourge of cords or