No doubt at present the direction of the flames is
regarded merely as an augury of the weather, not as a mode of
influencing it. But we may be pretty sure that this is one of the
cases in which magic has dwindled into divination. So in the Eifel
Mountains, when the smoke blows towards the corn-fields, this is an
omen that the harvest will be abundant. But the older view may have
been not merely that the smoke and flames prognosticated, but that
they actually produced an abundant harvest, the heat of the flames
acting like sunshine on the corn. Perhaps it was with this view that
people in the Isle of Man lit fires to windward of their fields in
order that the smoke might blow over them. So in South Africa, about
the month of April, the Matabeles light huge fires to the windward
of their gardens, "their idea being that the smoke, by passing over
the crops, will assist the ripening of them." Among the Zulus also
"medicine is burned on a fire placed to windward of the garden, the
fumigation which the plants in consequence receive being held to
improve the crop.
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