In some of these cases superstitious dread may have been a motive for destroying or banishing the instrument of death. There are facts which prove that such an object is looked upon as a source of danger. According to the Ripuarian law, people are forbidden to make use of a thing which has been "auctor interfectionis";[78] and in Norway, in quite modern times, sickles, axes, and other objects with which men have been killed, have been seen lying about abandoned and unused.[79] Again, among the aborigines of West Australia, if a person has been killed by a thrust of the native wooden spear, _ghici_, his country-men think that his soul remains in the point of the weapon which caused his death, and they burn it after his burial, so that the soul may depart.[80] But it is also obvious that an inanimate thing which is the cause of a hurt is apt to evoke a genuine feeling of resentment. We kick the chair over which we stumble, we curse the stone which hurts us; Dr Nansen says that, when he was crossing Greenland, it would have caused him "quite real satisfaction" to destroy a sledge which was **"heavy to draw."[81] When we thus behave as if the offending object were capable of feeling our resentment, we for a moment vaguely believe that it is alive.[82] But our anger very soon passes {263} away when we realise the true nature of its object. The case is different with men at earlier stages of civilisation. They do not suppose that things which hurt them are senseless; on the contrary, they personify such things, not only hastily and momentarily, but deliberately and permanently; hence their resentment lasts. The Guiana Indian, says Sir E. F. Im Thurn, "attributes any calamity which may happen to him to the intention of the immediate instrument of its infliction, and he not unnaturally sees in the action of this instrument evidence of its possession of a spirit."[83] Trees, especially, are very commonly supposed to possess souls similar to those of men, and are treated accordingly.[84] Pausanias writes that "lifeless things are said to have inflicted of their own accord a righteous punishment on men"; and as the best and most famous instance of this he mentions the sword of Cambyses.[85] In England the inanimate murderer was to be given up to the kinsmen of the slain surely not as a compensation for the loss they had suffered, but as an object upon which their vengeance was to be wreaked.[86] It was called _la bane_, that is, "the slayer"; Bracton also calls it the "malefactor."[87] It did not matter that its owner was recognised as innocent; the punishment was not intended for him.[88] But in some well-defined cases the "slayer" was free from guilt. A ship or other vessel from which a person was drowned by misfortune was not forfeited as deodand in case the accident happened in salt water--as Coke indicates, on account of the great dangers to which the vessel is exposed "upon the raging waves in respect of the wind and