 mountain, weapon, and so
forth--having its soul. We still find traces of this belief. The souls
of tools, weapons, and clothes, follow the dead on his wandering to the
land of the shades; therefore they are laid in the grave, that there
they may rot and their souls may be set free. Gradually, however, this
belief has, in the confused and illogical way peculiar to primitive
races, mixed itself up with a totally different one: the belief, to wit,
that the souls of the dead can take up their abode in different animals,
objects, mountains, and the like, which they subjugate to themselves,
and from which they can issue from time to time, even showing themselves
to the living. There has thus arisen the belief that in every natural
object there dwells a particular being, called its _inua_ (that is, its
owner)--a word which, characteristically enough, originally signified
human being or Eskimo.

According to the Eskimos, every stone, mountain, glacier, river, lake,
has its inua; the very air has one. It is still more remarkable to
find that even abstract conceptions have their inue; they speak for
example of the inue of particular instincts or passions. This may
seem surprising in a primitive people, but it is not very difficult
to explain. When, for example, a primitive man suffering from violent
hunger, feels an inward gnawing, it is quite natural that he should
conceive this to be caused by a being, whom he therefore describes as
the inua of hunger or appetite. As a rule, these inue are invisible,
but when they are seen, according to Rink, they take the form of a
brightness or fire, and the sight of them is very dangerous.

Man himself, according to the Greenlanders, consists of at least two
parts: the _body_ and the _soul_--and these they hold to be quite
distinct from each other. The soul can only be seen by aid of a
particular sense which is found in men under certain conditions, or
in those who possess a special gift: to wit, the angekoks. It appears
in the same shape as the body, but is of a more airy compositio