clairvoyant seer: these companies of spirits were called apa hau by the Tuhoe people, and they were represented in the living world by some living relative, who was the medium (kauwaka or kaupapa) through which such spirits communicated with, and acted as guardians of, their living relatives. A single person may be the medium of the kehua of many deceased relatives. Such kehua or wairua do not abide with the medium, but visit him when they have anything to communicate. The medium may be quite a common person, of no standing in the tribe until he becomes a medium. Ancient Greek philosophic thought ran to some extent in grooves parallel with that of the Maori. Thus the Greeks believed that the soul left the body and assumed animal form. In particular the snake was imagined to embody a soul; but the forms of bats, birds, and butterflies were also assigned to the spirits of the departed. The Greek ghosts, like the Maori kehua, kept the human form, and to them were ascribed all the attributes of living persons. Food was offered to them; ceremonies and rites were performed to appease their wrath; their influence was exerted only in the neighbourhood of their abode; they revealed future events, or the proper remedies for sickness; they avenged neglect by sending sickness or death, and were therefore called kereo (cf. Maori kehua)—in short, the Greek conception of the ancestral spirit resembled almost in every particular that of the untutored Maori. I have dwelt at length on the nature, modes of manifestation, and special characteristics of the kehua, or ancestral ghosts, because they are in many ways the counterpart in primitive medical systems of the pathogenic bacteria, or disease-germs, of modern medicine. The Maoris, and, in fact, man in all stages of evolution, from crude savagery to hypercivilisation, regard ancestral souls as playing a most important part in the causation of disease. At the present day the followers of Blavatsky and Besant attribute disease, like the Maori, to the kehua or ghost of the dead. Such was also the belief of the Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; and this theory still holds a prominent place in the medical lore of the Polynesians, Melanesians, Australian aboriginals, the Amazulu, Peruvians, and European peasants, especially in Russia, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. In India, China, and Japan we find similar ideas. It was not until the reign of George II. that the statute of James I. of England enacting that all persons invoking any evil spirit, or consulting, covenanting with, entertaining, employing, feeding, or rewarding any evil spirit, should be guilty of felony, and suffer death.(?) According to Maori belief the ancestral ghosts confined