sprinkle it with cider, putting cakes of toast and sugar soaked in new cider on the branches. And farmers do the same by their respective orchards and trees. The salutation takes the form of a prayer to the tree to be fruitful next year, and the custom also prevails in Sussex, being there known as apple-howling. In many parts of Germany the trees are bound round with straw at Christmas time, while at Reichenbach at Christmas a hole is dug at the foot of the fruit trees and some money placed there, to cause them to be gracious for the ensuing year. It is this last practice which explains the meaning, otherwise unintelligible, of the cakes and straw, for the association of all of them with Christmas points evidently to a community of origin and idea. Lastly, the custom which prevails in some parts of Germany, of beating trees with rods on Holy Innocents' day, to incite them to fruit bearing, must be taken as belonging to the same low phase of mental development with the other instances we have cited, in which the most obvious marks of natural differentiation have as yet been insufficient to produce corresponding distinctions in the mind of the beholders.

Fetishism, or the attempt to control external phenomena by witchcraft, though the lowest stage of religious conception, yet in its primary idea of a sympathy or identity existing between an original and its image, manifests some degree of intellectual advancement. For the idea of vicarious or representative influence, that if you wish to injure a man you can do so by an injury to a bit of his clothing or a lock of his hair, is, so far as it goes, a spiritual idea, presupposing notions about the interdependence of nature, and as far as possible removed from what we understand by mere materialism. Materialism indeed is one of the latest growths of the human mind, whilst spiritualism is one of its earliest. For to a savage, everything that exists lives and feels like himself, and the unseen spirits that surround and affect him are as the motes in a sunbeam for variety and number. Yet the fetishistic mode of thought is undoubtedly a low, and to us an absurd one. Burnings in effigy may probably be traced to it, and the stories so common in the annals of witchcraft of waxen images stuck with pins or burned, in order to injure the persons they represented, undoubtedly belong to it. In Sweden, there are still cunning men who can strike out a thief's eye by cutting a human figure on the bark of a tree and driving nails or arrows into the representative eye; and the Finns are said to this day to shoot in the water at images of their absent enemies. In Suffolk, in the last century, if an animal was thought to be bewitched, it was burned over a large fire, under the idea that as it consumed away the author of its bewitchment would consume away too. In Anglesey it is still believed that the name of a person inscribed on a pipkin, containing a live frog stuck full of pins, will injuriously affect the bearer of the name. And there are a numerous set of popular traditions which clearly relate to the same state of thought. There is a feeling so wide that it may be called European, that cut hair should always be burned, never thrown away: the reason given in France, in the Nether

lands, in Denmark, and near Saalfield in Germany, being, that its discovery by a witch would subject its owner to sorcery; that generally given in England and also in Swabia being, that if a bird took any of it for its nest the bearer would suffer from headache or lose the rest of his hair. A similar idea prevails about teeth: all over England children are taught to throw extracted teeth into the fire, lest a dog by swallowing them should induce the toothache. So with the nail that has scratched you, or the knife that has cut you,-keep the nail or knife free from rust, and the wound will not fester. Again, fetishism lies at the root of most popular charms for certain complaints. The remedies for warts, for instance, are all vicarious. Both at home and abroad the most usual method is to rub a black snail on the wart, and then to hang it on a hedge, trusting to the sympathetic decay of wart and snail. But a piece of stolen raw meat, a stalk of wheat or a hair with as many knots in them as there are warts on the hand, or two apple halves tied together, will, if applied to the part and then buried, cause effectual relief. The essential thing is to ensure the decay of the representative object. In Somersetshire a good ague cure is to shut up a large black spider in a box and leave it to perish, that spider and ague may disappear together. In many places, it is thought that the whooping-cough may be transferred to a hairy caterpillar tied in a bag round the neck: as the insect dies the cough will go. And in Devonshire some of the patient's hair is given to a dog between two slices of buttered bread, that the dog may take the hair and cough together; whilst in Sunderland the head is shaved and the hair (risking we must suppose a headache) left on a bush for the birds to carry off, that the cough itself may pass to them. But all such practices are but little removed from those actually existent among the lowest savages. New Zealanders, for instance, believe that men are subjected to makutu or witchcraft, through their food or anything belonging to them being so treated as to ensure the rage of their Atua. And Sir John Lubbock, speaking of modern savages, uses words which equally apply to, and throw remarkable light upon, some traditions we have mentioned. "A mysterious connexion is supposed to exist between a cut lock of hair and the person to whom it belonged. In various parts of the world the sorcerer gets clippings of the hair of his enemy, parings of his nails, or leavings of his food, convinced that whatever evil is done to these will react on their former owner. Even a piece of clothing, or the ground on which a person has trodden, will answer the purpose, and among some tribes the mere knowledge of a person's name is supposed to give a mysterious power."* Have we not here a key to the wide-spread custom of burning cut hair or extracted teeth, of which we have seen that the original reason is still remembered in many places, though in others it has been altered by time? Have we not seen the pernicious use to which the knowledge of a person's name still exposes its owner in Anglesey? And

*Prehistoric Times, 471.

may we not conclude that such customs and fancies betray à mental constitution radically different from our present one, taking us back and ever reminding us of the savagery of our lineage as surely as do flintflakes or bone-needles, and teaching us that only by the slowest degrees can emancipation be achieved from the superstitions, or, as some think, the poetry, of ignorance?

Totemism, or the worship of natural objects, is one of the earliest stages in the religious development of humanity. Trees, stones, waters, stars, serpents, or animals, are all to this day worshipped far and wide by uncivilized races, and the marks of a similar object-worship by the Aryan race still survive in many a popular tradition. A law of Canute earnestly forbade the heathenship of reverencing "the sun or moon, fire or flood, waterwhylls, or stones, or trees of the wood of any sort;" yet, if such things are no longer worshipped, it may be certainly said that some of them are still reverenced. To take, for instance, tree worship. The trees which occupy the most prominent place in European folk-lore are the elder, the thorn, and the rowan or mountain ash. In the midland counties still elder is never bound up with other faggots, for the Cross, they say, was made of its wood; and in Suffolk, for the same reason, it is the safest tree to stand under in a thunderstorm, and misfortune will ensue if ever it is burned. But the legend of the Cross is evidently an aftergrowth, an attempt, of which we have so many examples, to give a Christian colour to a heathen practice; for the elder was the tree under which, in pre-Christian times, the old Prussian Earthgod was fabled to dwell. In Lower Saxony peasants used to pray to the elder, on their knees, with bare head and folded hands, before they dared to lop off its branches.* In Denmark a twig of elder placed silently in the ground is a popular cure for tooth-ache or ague, whilst no furniture, least of all a cradle, may be made of its wood; for the tree is protected by the Elder-mother, who would strangle the baby as it lay asleep; since without her consent not a leaf may be touched. So also about Chemnitz, elder boughs fixed before stalls keep witchcraft from the cattle; and wreaths of it hung up in houses on Good Friday, after sunset, are believed to give immunity from the ravages of caterpillars. Like the elder, the whitethorn was once an object of worship, for it too is held to be scatheless in storms; and how else can we account for the fact that in Switzerland, as in the eastern counties of England, to bring its flowers into a house is thought to bring death, than by supposing it was once a tree too sacred to be touched, and likely to avenge in some way the profanation that was done to it? Too deeply rooted in popular veneration for its sacred character to disappear, the Church, in course of time, wound its own legend round it, and by the fiction that its wood had composed the Crown of Thorns, deprived the worship of its heathen sting. But if round the elder and the thorn feelings of reverence once

Grimm himself was an eye-witness of this: Deutsche Mythologie, p. 375.

gathered and still linger, yet more is it true of the rowan. In England, Germany, and Sweden its leaves are still the most potent instrument against the darker powers: Highlanders still insert crosses of it with red thread in the lining of their clothes, and Cornish peasants still carry some in their pocket and wind it round the horns of their cattle in order to keep off evil eyes. In Lancashire sprigs of it are for the same reason hung up at bedheads, and the churn staff is generally made of its wood. It used to stand in nearly every churchyard in Wales, and crosses of it were regularly distributed on Christian festivals as sure preservatives against evil spirits. But this is another attempt to Christianise what was heathen, for the ancient Danes always used some of it for their ships, to secure them against the storms which Rân, the great Ocean God's wife, with her net for capsized mariners, was ever ready and desirous to raise. Now the rowan in heathen mythology was called Thor's Helper, because it bent to his grasp in his passage over a flooded river on his way to the land of the Frost Giants; and it has been thought that the later sanctity of the tree may be due to the place it occupied in mythological fancy. Yet it seems more reasonable to trace the myth to a yet older superstition than to trace the superstition to the myth. For from the exceeding beauty of their berries the rowan and the elder and the thorn would naturally impress the savage mind with the feelings of actual divinity, and would consequently lend themselves to the earliest imaginings about the universe of things. It is more likely that they progressed from a divinity on earth to their position in mythology than from their position in mythology to a divinity on earth, for the mind is capable of employing things for worship long before it is capable of employing them for fable. Worship is the product of fear, and fable of fancy; and before men can indulge in fancy they must be free from fear.

Certain traditions relating to birds and beasts are only explicable on the supposition that they were once objects of divination or worship. The old Germans, we know from Tacitus, used white horses, as the Romans used chickens, for purposes of augury, and divined future events from different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of the feelings that once attached to the animal itself still surviving round the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs or birds, were invariably accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself; and the many superstitions connected with the flight or voice of birds resolve themselves into the fancy, not inconceivable among men surrounded on all sides by unintelligible tongues, that birds were the bearers of messages and warnings to men, which skill and observation might hope to interpret. Why is the robin's life and nest sacred, and why does an injury to either bring about bloody milk, lightning, or rain? The Christian legend says that it extracted a thorn from the crown of Christ, or that it daily bears to hell a drop of water to put out the flames, and accounts in either way for the red dye on its breast. But this is evidently a VOL. XXXIII.-NO. 193.

3.

mediæval gloss to some heathen belief, like the reason for the unluckiness of the magpie, that it would not enter the ark, but sat jabbering outside over the drowned world; or like the idea of the aspen still trembling at the part it played in the Crucifixion. It has been suggested that the robin, on account of its colour, was once sacred to Thor, the god of lightning; yet, is it not possible that its red breast singled it out for worship from among birds, just as its red berries the rowan from among trees, long before its worshippers had arrived at any ideas of abstract divinities? All over the world there is a regard for things red. In the Highlands women tie some red thread round the cows' tails before turning them out to grass in spring, and tie red silk round their own fingers to keep off the witches and just as in Esthonia, mothers put some red thread in their babies' cradles, so in China they tie some round their children's wrists, and teach them to regard red as the best known safeguard against evil spirits.

:

Indeed, one of the chief lessons of Comparative Folk-Lore is a caution against the theory which deduces popular traditions from Aryan or other mythology. We have already alluded to the fact that in parts of China the same feelings prevail about the swallow as in England or Germany. But there are yet other analogies between the East and the West. A crowing hen is an object of universal dislike in England and Brittany; and few families in China will keep a crowing hen.* The owl's voice is ominous of death or other calamity in England and Germany, as it was in Greece (except at Athens); but in the Celestial Empire also it presages death, and is regarded as the bird which calls for the soul. And the crow also is in China a bird of ill omen. Is it not therefore likely that all popular fancies about birds and animals have begun in the same way, among the same or different races of the globe, and were subsequently adopted but never originated by mythology? May it not be that certain birds or animals became prominent in mythology because they had already been prominent in tradition, rather than that they became prominent in tradition because they previously had been prominent in mythology? For instance, instead of tracing a dog's howling as a death omen to an Aryan belief that the dog guided the soul from its earthly tenement to its abode in heaven, may we not suppose that the myth arose from an already existing omen, and that the latter arose, as omens still do, from a coincidence which suggested a connection subsequently sustained by superficial observation ? The St. Swithin fallacy, which arose within historical memory and still holds its ground in an age of scientific observation, well illustrates how one striking coincidence may grow into a belief, which no amount of later evidence can weaken or destroy. Just so, if it happened that a dog howled shortly before some calamity occurred to our Aryan forefathers, thousands and thousands of years ago, long before they had attained to any thoughts of

* Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, ii. 328.