and more likely candidate to this rather doubtful honor. This was an Ao named Imtong-lippa of Changki. While this beat was going on three miles away, he was behaving like a lunatic in the house of one of the hospital servants at Mokokchung. During his possession he identified himself with one of the tigers being hunted and stated that one of them was wounded and speared; that he himself was hit with a stick (the Ao method of beating entailed the throwing of sticks and stones and abuse incessantly to make the tiger come out). He laid a rolled mat to represent a fence and six times leapt across it. He ate ginger and drank a whole bamboo "chunga " (about a bucketful) of water, after which he said that he had escaped with two other tigers after crossing a stream, and was hiding in a hole, but that one tigress, a trans-frontier woman, had been speared in the side (in point of fact she was speared in the neck) and had been left behind and would die. (We shot the tigress in the end.) He said there were four tigers surrounded. Chekiye said six. Four actually were seen, however, two grown and two half- or threequarters grown. There may have been others, but it is not very likely. Some sixteen cattle had been killed in two days. This account I took down after returning from the beat, on the same day, from an eyewitness of Imtong-lippa's exhibition, which was seen and watched by a large number of men both reliable and otherwise in their accounts of it.

I have given these details as they show clearly the Naga beliefs on the subject. Of course among the Semas the idea of what one might describe as the projectability of the soul is very pronounced. It is a common thing for a sick person to ascribe his sickness to the absence of his soul from his body, and under such circumstances he takes food and drink and goes to the field or any other places where he thinks his soul has got left behind and summons it, calling it, of course, by his own name. When it has arrived he comes slowly home, bringing his soul behind him. A case once came up before me for adjudication in which an old man named Nikiye, who had been ill for some time, went to the fields to call his soul. It came, and he was climbing slowly back to the village occasionally calling Nikiye, Nikiye!" over his shoulder to make sure that the truant soul was following. Unfortunately a personal enemy had observed him, and lay in wait in the bush by the path with a thick stick. As the old man tottered by he sprang from his ambush with a yell, and brought down his stick with a thud on the path immediately behind Nikiye's heels. The frightened soul fled incontinently, and the old fellow himself died of the loss of it two days later. To avoid losing the soul a Sema, who makes a temporary shelter away from home,

always burns it on leaving it, lest his soul, having taken a fancy to it, should stray back there by itself.

To return to lycanthropy in particular, the practice described, as distinct from the belief, seems particularly associated in Assam with the immigration from the northwest-that is, from the direction of Nepal and Thibet. The Changs probably have an admixture of Singpho blood, and the Singphos are known to have come from that direction; so, too, the Kacharis who, like the Changs, have a clan of tiger men, and call it the Mosa-aroi, and the Meches who have a corresponding clan called Masha-aroi, which also goes into mourning for the death of a tiger-both came from the north of the Brahmaputra. Among the Garos also the practice is found, and they too came from the same direction. On the other hand the Khasis, who seem to belong to a different stock-perhaps to the Kol-MonAnnam race, and to have come from the east-say they believe in the existence of tiger men, but appear to have absorbed the idea from the Garos, who are their neighbors, and not to have possessed it as an indigenous idea, nor to indulge in, or believe that they indulge in, the practice themselves. The Angami, who also does not practise lycanthropy, again seem to have immigrated into the Naga Hills from the southeast and to be intimately connected with the Bontoc Igorot of Luzon in the Philippines. In other ways, however, particularly in language, the Sema is connected with the Angami, though on the other hand there are points of culture which keep suggesting a connection between the Sema and the Garo. One of them is the use of Y-shaped posts to celebrate feasts given to the village, similar wooden posts being used by the Garo, though he is at present entirely isolated from the Sema, while the Kachari ruins at Dimapur contain the same bifurcated monuments in stone. Perhaps the explanation is that the present Sema tribe is the result of the amalgamation of a small Angami element which has imposed itself upon another stock, a process which the Sema tribe itself is still carrying on with regard to its neighbors to the east at a very rapid rate, a Sema chief or adventurer grafting himself and a few followers on to a Sangtam or Yachungr village; this in a generation or less becomes entirely Sema in language and polity, though no doubt retaining its former beliefs and certainly retaining much of its former ceremonial.

The theory that this form of lycanthropy comes from a northern source is perhaps supported by the fact that the form which the belief takes in Burma and Malay, as well as in the plains of India, seems to turn on an actual metamorphosis of the body. Mr. GrantBrown, writing in the Royal Anthropological Institute's Journal in 1911 about the Tamans, a tribe of Chinese origin in the Upper Chind

win Valley, notes that they transform themselves into tigers by making water and then rolling naked on the earth they have wetted.

A nearer approach to the Naga belief appears to exist in Malay, but here again actual metamorphosis seems to be essential to that form of lycanthropy. Mr. O'May, writing in Folklore in 1910 (Vol. XXI, p. 371) says that in Burma and Sumatra a quite ordinary man may turn into a tiger in the evening without any fuss, and he goes on to describe a Malay game of turning into a civet cat, in which a boy is actually hypnotized and caused to behave like a civet cat, becoming (as the Naga were-leopard does) much exhausted when the trance is over. So, too, Skeat mentions the case of one Haji Abdallah caught naked in a tiger trap in Korinchi State in Sumatra (Malay Magic, p. 160-163), while Messrs Skeat and Blagden note that the were-tigers of the Malay Peninsula (most unlike the Nagas, here) can not be shot in their metamorphosed condition (Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, p. 227).

Skeat also records the inverse of the Naga case, in the process by which a possession of the human body by a tiger spirit is invoked to cast out another and less powerful possessing spirit (Malay Magic, p. 436), and similarly (p. 455) the induction of a monkey spirit into a girl who, while thus possessed, is capable of the most remarkable climbing feats.

In all these cases, however, the practice differs from that of the Nagas in that either metamorphosis takes place, or it is the animal spirit which possesses the human body, not the other way round. For with the Naga were-leopard the soul is merely projected into the body of the animal, while no metamorphosis of the human body takes place nor is any sort of hypnotism employed-unless, indeed, it be self-hypnotism, and involuntary at that.

Sir James Frazer (G. B., Vol. XI, p. 196) gives instances from Asia of the location of the external soul in animals for the purposes of ensuring its safety or for enhancing the power of the magician. Neither of these two motives appears to influence the Naga werewolf in any way. It is recognized on all hands that the practice is a dangerous one, and it is said to be rapidly decreasing owing to the increased number of guns in the district, which make it still more dangerous than it was. Lycanthropy is not practiced by wizards, as were-tigers are, as far as I know, invariably ordinary men who do not claim to supernatural powers of any sort. The nearest parallels seem to come from Africa, and Sir James Frazer mentions several beliefs from Nigeria which resemble the Naga belief pretty closely. One other point may be added. In some cases lycanthropy among Nagas seems to be hereditary, or perhaps rather one should say that a tendency towards it may be inherited, as in

the case of many diseases; and indeed Mr. Baring-Gould described lycanthropy as a disease, associating it in this respect with the mania for cattle-maiming and with a morbid desire to devour human corpses. Cases of both of these I have met with in the Naga Hills, the latter, however, being regarded by the Nagas themselves as symptomatic of extreme insanity; whereas the former is, like lycanthropy, merely a vice which is liable to be very troublesome to the neighbors of those that practice it."

Note on Ao Naga belief as to a certain form of relationship between men and leopards.-One Longrizibba of Yongimsen village was haunted by a leopard which very frequently came at night and slept outside his house close to that place by the wall nearest which Longrizibba himself was sleeping inside. Whenever the leopard came, Longrizibba fell into a deep sleep and could not be aroused by his wife, even though he had previously sharpened his spear with a view to killing the animal. Then he took to sleeping on the platformi at the back of his house, when the leopard took to sleeping underneath. On one occasion water was poured on to it, but without discouraging it.

After this and other efforts to get rid of it, Longrizibba induced the leopard to leave him alone by the sacrifice of a dog. This took place in 1919 when I was on leave, and my attention was drawn to the case by Mr. Mills, Subdivisional Officer of Mokokchung, one of whose interpreters saw the leopard outside the house at night.

Apparently such associations of men with leopards are, according to the Ao tribe, fairly frequent. The relations between the man and the leopard are normally quite friendly and mutually harmless until on an appointed day they are brought to an end by the leopard's devouring the man.

If the haunting is caused by some ceremonial fault on the man's part, it can be ended by a ceremony which includes the surrender of a cloth, a dao sling, and a piece of the man's own hair. If, however, the relationship dates from a man's infancy and has no cause that can be specified, he is unable to break off the relationship.

A mountain with twin peaks is pointed out by Ao as a meeting place of tiger-men.

The practice of surrendering to the leopard a piece of the haunted man's hair is paralleled in the Chang tribe by the practice, when a man loses himself in the forest, of cutting off a little hair and putting it in the fork of a tree for the rock python which is believed to have caused him to lose himself. After this the lost man is able to find his way home. Semas under similar conditions cut a piece off the fringe of their cloth instead of their hair.

8 Book of Were-Wolves.

Prof. Elliot Smith tells me that Egyptian boys practise lycanthropy in association with the forms of the common cat. A bibliography on the subject of lycanthropy will be found at the end of Mr. McLennan's article in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, but it relates almost entirely to the European races.

A NEW ERA IN PALESTINE EXPLORATION.

By ELIHU GRANT,
Haverford College.

[With 7 plates.]

Every indication points to the beginning of new opportunities and new interest in the subject of Oriental research in Western Asia and adjacent lands. It is impossible, of course, to forecast the disturbances which may yet arise but the general disposition of the provinces of the old Turkish Empire bids fair to affect favorably the problems of archeology so far as field-work goes. Exploration in Bible lands leads usually to an increase in our knowledge of all the lands and peoples between Persia and Italy. The study of the subject has always been an aid to an understanding of the civilizations which account for more than half of human history. Language, law, philosophy, geography, ethnology, and sociology have often profited by enquiries which were set on foot, in the first instance, for the sake of a better understanding of the Old and New Testaments.

The earlier ages of travel and exploration in Palestine culminated in the excellent publications of Robinson in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. A second period, of the greater excavations, began shortly after that time and now a third seems to have opened under more favorable governmental conditions in the Holy Land.

What heartbreaking difficulties were met in that second, or heroic period! The groaning complaints of those scientific venturers who attempted to explore lands held by the Turks may be read in many a volume and article. Besides the complaints rose the wails of observers who saw the native digger evade the law and bring in his illicit finds from rifled tomb and mound to sell to the curious buyer of "antikies." It still remains true, however, that not a tithe of the ruin heaps of ancient cities and villages have been scratched. The chances are so good that when the opportunity opens, one eagerly scans a dozen possibilities, wondering which place will be most rewarding.

One blessing which followed from the old system of things, or lack of it, was that in spite of the secret digging of the ignorant vender, most of the precious archives in the dirt were spared until