Anything, then, may have “soul” after its kind: relatively inert things have relatively inert souls, but never true ghosts; some animals may have ghosts, especially if they have attained to a certain individuality, but generally only in so far as they are imagined to attend upon human ghosts or spirits. Inasmuch as the word “soul” is often used as equivalent to “ghost,” it would be convenient always to speak of the soul which is ghost-food, or ghost-body, “as soul-stuff.”[194] Soul-stuff is conceived of as material, though subtle and normally invisible. A man’s soul-stuff may be regarded not only as permeating his body, but also as infecting everything he possesses or touches: no doubt by analogy with his odour; for a man’s odour is a personal quality, distinguishable by dogs and (I believe) by some savages and hypnotic subjects; and the stench of his putrefying corpse may be supposed to convey his courage and skill to those who inhale it.[195] And the savour of a burnt-offering is food for gods. Indeed, Ellis says explicitly that, in Tahiti, food was put to the mouth of a chieftain’s corpse; because, they said, there was a spiritual as well as a material part of food, a part which they could smell.[196] Savage ideas are generally so little thought out, and are so irregularly thought out by different tribes, that the relation of a thing to its soul-stuff varies widely from one tribe to another. In many cases the extraction by ghost or god of the soul-stuff from an offering may affect it so little, that the devotee or the priest proceeds to feast upon it; and I have nowhere met with the notion (which logic requires) that such metaphysically eviscerated food can only nourish a man’s body and not his soul. However, since the eating of the sacrifice may be an act of communion with the ghost, he then naturally extracts the goodness only from his own share. In other cases, the breaking of weapons and utensils buried with a corpse implies an intimate unity between the wholeness of an object and its soul-stuff; and the Rev. J. H. Weeks says of the considerable wealth put into a grave by the Bakongo, that only the shell or semblance of anything is supposed to remain there.[197]