(M138) Here the words uttered by the mourners in passing through the cloven stick shew clearly that they believe the stick to act as a barrier or fence, on the further side of which they leave behind the ghost or other dangerous spirit whose successful pursuit might entail sickness and death on the survivors. Thus the passage of these Madang mourners through the cleft stick is strictly analogous to the passage of ruptured English children through a cleft ash-tree. Both are simply ways of leaving an evil thing behind. Similarly the subsequent binding up of the cloven stick in Borneo is analogous to the binding up of the cloven ash-tree in England. Both are ways of barricading the road against the evil which is dogging your steps; having passed through the doorway you slam the door in the face of your pursuer. Yet it seems probable that the intention of binding up the cleft in a tree through which a ruptured patient has been passed is not merely that of shutting the door on the malady conceived as a personal being; combined with this idea is perhaps the notion that in virtue of the law of magical homoeopathy the rupture in the body of the sufferer will close up exactly in the same measure as the cleft in the tree closes up through the force of bandages and of natural growth. That this shade of meaning attaches to the custom is rendered probable by a comparison of an ancient Roman cure for dislocation, which has been preserved for us by the grave authority of the elder Cato. He recommended that a green reed, four or five feet long, should be taken, split down the middle, and held by two men to the dislocated bones while a curious and now unintelligible spell was recited; then, when the spell had been recited and the aperture in the reed had closed, the reed was to be tied to the dislocated limb, and a perfect cure might be expected. Apparently it was supposed that just as the two sides of the split reed came together and coalesced after being held apart, so the dislocated bones would come together and fit into their proper places.(483)