6 THE COMING [CH. 



bare ground they witnessed the upspringing of all 

 the wondrous beauty of the plant- world, and, in their 

 ignorance of the chemistry of vegetable life, they 

 imagined that the herbs, shrubs and trees are all 

 alike built up out of the materials contained in the 

 soil from which they grow. The recognition of the 

 fact that animals feed on plants, or on one another, 

 led to the obvious conclusion that the ultimate 

 materials of animal, as well as of vegetable, structures 

 were to be sought for in the soil. And this view was 

 confirmed by the fact that, when life ceases in plants 

 or animals, all alike are reduced to ' dust ' and again 

 become a part of the soil returning ' earth to earth/ 

 In groping therefore for an explanation of the origin 

 of li ving things, what could be more natural than the 

 supposition that the first plants and animals like 

 those now surrounding us were made and fashioned 

 from the soil, dust or earth all had been 'clay in 

 the hands of a potter/ The widely diffused notion 

 that man himself must have been moulded out of red 

 clay is probably accounted for by the colour of our 

 internal organs. 



Thus originated a large class of legendary stories, 

 many of them of a very grotesque character. Even 

 in many mediaeval sculptures, in this country and on 

 the continent, the Deity is represented as moulding 

 with his hands the semblance of a human figure out 

 of a shapeless lump of clay. 



