494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Now, the ordinary food of the living would of course include 

 grains, seeds, such fruits as bananas, plantains, or melons, and 

 many other vegetable objects. Mr. Macdonald adds the signifi- 

 cant note : " It is not considered necessary that these offerings be 

 taken away by the spirits. It is sufficient that they are placed 

 there, that the spirits may come and lick them." * He further 

 mentions that on these same graves fowls may be offered by cut- 

 ting the throat, and making the blood flow down. " When the 

 fowl is killed/' says he, " they simply lay it down at the prayer 

 tree/' A goat may be offered in the same way, or milk may be 

 poured out at the foot of the sacred banyan. What is the impli- 

 cation ? Why, naturally, seeds placed in newly turned soil over a 

 dead body, and richly manured with constant supplies of blood 

 and milk, would germinate freely and produce unusually fine crops 

 of grain or fruit. Is it suggesting too much to hint that, in this 

 almost universal rite, we may even see the ultimate origin of cul- 

 tivation ? Primitive man, careless of the future as he is, would 

 scarcely be likely deliberately to retain seeds from one year to 

 the next for the purpose of sowing them. It is his habit rather 

 to eat and destroy with lavish prodigality whatever he possesses 

 in the pure recklessness of the moment. Something must first 

 show him that seeds produce an increase before he can think of 

 keeping them and deliberately planting them. 



It has usually been held, to be sure, that cultivation must have 

 taken its rise from the accident of chance seeds being scattered 

 about in the neighborhood of the hut or of the domestic manure- 

 heap — the barbaric kitchen midden. This may be so, of course ; 

 but it seems to me at least equally probable that cultivation 

 should have begun through the offerings of grains and fruits and 

 seeds at the graves or barrows of departed ancestors. Certainly 

 we see that fruits and seeds are constantly so offered by existing 

 savages. We know that they are deposited under conditions 

 most favorable to their growth and productivity. And we can 

 hardly doubt that the luxuriance of the vegetation so produced 

 would greatly strike the mind of the early savage, and would be 

 implicitly assigned to the productive power of his dead ancestors. 

 I shall show in the sequel that the presence of an informing 

 ghost or spirit of vegetation is even considered essential to the 

 growth of crops by existing savages, and that human victims are 

 slain by them for the mere purpose of providing such indwelling 

 deities. The ghost in fact plays in the ideas of early man the 

 same part that guano and phosphates play to-day in the ideas of 

 the educated scientific farmer. 



Nor is this all ; I will even venture to go one step further. Is 



* Africuna, vol. i, p. 95. 



