Again, in South-East Australia, a _bulk_—a pebble, usually black and roundish—is carried by wizards as a powerful talisman. A native dreamt of seeing two ghosts by his camp fire, and, on waking, found a _bulk_ where they had stood.[280] How could such an impressive experience fail to raise a belief in a connexion between ghosts and _bulks_: both so attractive to the imagination, and alike mysterious and powerful? Many such situations must strongly indicate an extension of the ghost-theory, once it has been formed, to explain the influence of charms and rites. A time comes with some tribes when the activity and ubiquity of spirits is so much a matter of course that every mysterious power is apt to be ascribed to their presence. If a person or thing was originally taboo, either by inherent virtue or by force of a spell or curse—a talisman dangerous to every one who violated its sanctity—Animism explains the danger by the wrath of a protecting spirit. A boundary having long been taboo, a spirit is imagined to protect the boundary, and becomes the god Terminus. Diseases, at first attributed to Magic, are later explained by Animism; so that whilst an Australian wizard is content to suck a magically implanted stone or splinter from his patient’s body, a priest of the Dyaks, having sucked out a similar object, calls it a spirit.[281] The wonder is that at this stage of thought any purely magical power can survive. (_c_) An Omen is regarded as giving warning of some event, although between event and omen there is no traceable connexion—in this resembling many magical operations; and at first omens may have been always so conceived of, and only by degrees distinguished from charms and spells. But in most parts of the world omens have come to be treated as divine or spiritual premonitions; and the marks which distinguish omens from the rest of Magic are such as to favour a growth of the belief that they are sent by spirits. This subject, however, is so extensive that a separate chapter must be given to it.