In North Central Australia, short sticks or bones are used for pointing at an enemy and directing magical force against him. Only the Guangi and other tribes of the Gulf coast manufacture dead men’s bones (femur or fibula) into pointers; but these are traded southward, and are considered more potent than other pointers.[278] A stick, then, is the primitive talisman, often “sung” with a spell in Alcheringa words, which the operator himself does not understand; and it acts by pure magic. The dead man’s bone is more potent, at first perhaps only because it is more oppressively gruesome and terrifying; we are not told that it carries the power of its former owner’s ghost; but how near the thought must be! In South-East Australia, pointing with the bone (human fibula) is very common; in pointing you name your victim and say how he is to die; but that the efficacy of the rite does not depend upon a spirit is shown by this, that, when pointing, you tie a cord of human hair (attached to the bone) tightly around your upper arm, in order to drive blood into the bone. In other rites, however, in which the fat of a dead man is used, the ghost of the dead is believed to assist the operation; for a man’s fat, especially kidney-fat, is the seat of his prowess and other virtues.[279] An easy extension of ideas by analogy would interpret a rite in which a dead man’s bone is used, and which is on that account more potent, as owing its superior potency to the assistance of the dead man’s ghost. It seems easy; but resistance to the progress of explanation is not peculiar to the civilised mind.