THE GENESIS OF SUPERSTITIONS. 517 



While gathering food on the sea-shore, he finds, protruding from 

 a rock, a shell which, if not of the same shape as the shells he picks 

 up, is so similar that he naturally classes it with them. But, instead 

 of being loose, it is part of a solid block ; and, on breaking it off, he 

 finds its inside as hard as its matrix. Here, then, are two kindred 

 forms, one of which consists of shell and flesh, and the other of shell 

 and stone. Near at hand, in the mass of clay debris detached from 

 the adjacent cliff, he picks up a fossile ammonite. Perhaps, like the 

 Gryphoea just examined, it has a shelly coating with a stony inside. 

 Perhaps, as happens with some liassic ammonites of which the shell 

 has been dissolved away, leaving the masses of indurated clay that 

 filled its chambers locked loosely together, it suggests a series of 

 articulated vertebrae coiled up ; or, as with other liassic ammonites of 

 which the shell has been replaced by iron pyrites, it has a glistening 

 appearance like that of a snake's skin. As such fossils are sometimes 

 called " snake-stones," and are in Ireland supposed to be the serpents 

 St. Patrick banished, we cannot wonder if the uncritical savage, class- 

 ing this object with those it most resembles, thinks it a transmuted 

 snake once flesh and now stone. In another place, where a gully 

 has been cut through sandstone by a stream, he observes on the sur- 

 face of a slab the outline of a fish, and, looking closely, sees scales 

 and the traces of fins ; and elsewhere, similarly embedded in rock, he 

 finds skulls and bones not unlike those of the animals he kills for 

 food ; some of them, indeed, not unlike those of men. 



Still more striking are the transmutations of plants occasionally 

 discovered. I do not refer so much to the prints of leaves in shale, 

 and the fossil stems found in strata accompanying coal; I refer, more 

 especially, to the silicified trees here and there met with. Retaining, 

 not their general forms only but their minute structures, so that the 

 annual growths are marked by rings of color such as mark them in 

 living stems, these yield the savage clear evidence of transmutation. 

 With all our knowledge it remains difficult to understand how silica 

 can so replace the components of the wood as to preserve the appear- 

 ance thus perfectly ; and for the primitive man, knowing nothing of 

 molecular action and unable to conceive a process of substitution, 

 there is no possible thought but that the wood is changed into stone. 



Thus, if we ignore those conceptions of physical causation which 

 have arisen only as experiences have been slowly organized during 

 civilization, we shall see that in their absence there would be nothing 

 to prevent us from putting on these facts the interpretations which 

 the primitive man puts on them. Looking at the evidence through 

 his eyes, we find his belief, that things change from one kind of sub- 

 stance to another, to be the inevitable belief 



And here let us not omit to note that along with the notion of 

 transmutation is involved the notion of duality. These things have 

 obviously two states of existence. 



