Note 1 — Chapter III · RELIGIOUS AND MAGICAL BELIEFS

The present chapter is devoted to an attempt to interpret some of the beliefs and customs of the Andaman Islanders, as they have been described in the earlier part of this work. By the interpretation of a custom is meant the discovery, not of its origin, but of its meaning. The system of beliefs and customs that exists to-day in the Andamans is the result of a long process of evolution. To seek the origin of these customs, as the word origin is here used, is to seek to know the details of the historical process by which they have come into existence. In the absence of all historical records, the most that we could do would be to attempt to make a hypothetical reconstruction of the past, which, in the present state of ethnological science, would be of very doubtful utility1.