49Q THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



where in any part of his epoch-making work a single phrase 

 which would lead me to suppose he would willingly accept the 

 theory of the affiliation of tree gods and spirits generally upon 

 the ghosts of dead ancestors. Nevertheless, I believe such an 

 affiliation to be not only possible, but natural and provable. It 

 is the object of the present Excursus, indeed, to show in brief 

 outline that the tree spirit and the corn spirit, like most other 

 deities, originate in the ghost of the deified ancestor. 



Let us begin by examining and endeavoring to understand a 

 few cases of tree spirits in various mythologies. Virgil tells us in 

 the Third JEneid how, on a certain occasion, JEneas was offering 

 a sacrifice on a tumulus crowned with dogwood and myrtle 

 bushes. He endeavored to pluck up some of these by the roots, 

 in order to cover the altar, as was customary, with leaf-clad 

 branches. As he did so, the first bush which he tore up astound- 

 ed him by exuding drops of liquid blood, which trickled and fell 

 upon the soil beneath. He tried again, and again the tree bled 

 human gore. On the third trial, a groan was heard proceeding 

 from the tumulus, and a voice assured JEneas that the barrow on 

 which he stood covered the murdered remains of his friend Poly- 

 dorus. 



Now, in this typical and highly illustrative myth — no doubt 

 an ancient and well-known story incorporated by Virgil in his 

 great poem — we see that the tree which grows upon a barrow is 

 itself regarded as the representative and embodiment of the dead 

 man's soul, just as elsewhere the snake which glides from the 

 tomb of Anchises is regarded as the embodied spirit of the hero, 

 and just as the owls and bats which haunt sepulchral caves are 

 often identified in all parts of the world with the souls of the 

 departed. 



Similar stories of bleeding or speaking trees or bushes occur 

 abundantly elsewhere. " When the oak is being felled," says 

 Aubrey, in his Remaines of Gentilisme, page 247, " it gives a kind 

 of shriekes and groanes that may be heard a mile off, as if it were 

 the genius of the oak lamenting. E. Wyld, Esqr., hath heard it 

 severall times." Certain Indians, says Bastian, dare not cut a 

 particular plant, because there comes out of it a red juice which 

 they take for its blood. I myself remember hearing as a boy in 

 Canada that wherever Sanguinaria canadensis, the common 

 American bloodroot, grew in the woods, an Indian had once been 

 buried, and that the red drops of juice which exuded from the 

 stem when one picked the flowers were the dead man's blood. In 

 Samoa, says Mr. Turner,* the special abode of Tuifiti, King of 

 Fiji, was a grove of large and durable afzelia trees. " No one 



* Turner's Samoa, p. 63. 



