about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round. For
a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting lecture
delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a
bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled
round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like those
chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which
contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace.
But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name,
producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if
some supernatural being 'fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful
roar.' Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief
experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in
England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and
unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.

The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most
extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in
folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples,
savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and
civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on this a
hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend
from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very
purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards
similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere.
There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to
account for this widely diffused sacred object.

The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in many
and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred instrument,
employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in Australia, in New