THE GENESIS OF SUPERSTITIONS. 



5*5 



moon, besides doing the like, first increases slowly night after night, 

 and then wanes, by-and-by reappearing as a thin bright streak, with 

 the rest of her disk so faintly perceptible as to seem only half existing. 



Added to these commonest and most regular occupations and 

 manifestations, are various others, even more striking comets, me- 

 teors, and the aurora with its arch and pulsating streams ; flashes of 

 lightning, rainbows, halos. Differing from the rest and from one 

 another as these do, they similarly appear and disappear. So that by 

 a being absolutely ignorant, but able to remember, and to group the 

 things he remembers, the heavens must be regarded as a scene of 

 arrivals and departures of many kinds of existences ; some gradual, 

 some sudden, but alike in this, that it is impossible to say whence the 

 existences come or whither they go. 



Not the sky only, but also the earth's surface, supplies various 

 instances of these disappearances of things which have unaccountably 

 appeared. Now the savage sees little pools of water formed by the 

 rain-drops coming from a source he cannot reach ; and now, in a few 

 hours, the gathered liquid has made itself invisible. Here, again, is 

 a fog ; perhaps lying isolated in the hollows, perhaps enwrapping 

 every thing, which came a while since and presently goes without 

 leaving a trace of its whereabouts. Afar off is perceived water ob- 

 viously a great lake ; but on approaching it the seeming lake recedes, 

 and cannot be found. In the desert, what we know as sand-whirl- 

 winds, and on the sea what we know as water-spouts, are to the 

 primitive man moving things which appear and then vanish. Looking 

 out over the ocean, he recognizes an island known to be a long way 

 off, and commonly invisible, but which has now risen out of the 

 water; and to-morrow, just above the horizon, he observes an inverted 

 figure of a boat, perhaps by itself, or perhaps joined to an erect figure 

 above. In one place he sometimes perceives land-objects on the sur- 

 face of the sea, or in the air over it a fata morgana; and in 

 another, over against him on the mist, there occasionally comes into 

 view a gigantic duplicate of himself " a Brocken spectre." These 

 occurrences, some familiar and some unfamiliar, repeat the same ex- 

 perience show transitions between the visible and the invisible. 



Once more, let us ask what must be the original conception of 

 wind. Consider the facts apart from hypothesis, and the implication 

 which every breeze or gust carries with it is that of a power neither 

 visible nor tangible. Nothing in early experiences yields the idea of 

 air, as we are now familiar with it ; and, indeed, probably most can 

 recall the difficulty they once had in thinking of the surrounding 

 medium as a material substance. The primitive man cannot regard it 

 as a something which acts as do the things he sees and handles. Into 

 this seemingly-empty space around, there from time to time comes an 

 invisible agent which bends the trees, drives along the leaves, disturbs 

 the water, and which he feels moving his hair, fanning his cheek, and 



